An Ontologist Explains Themselves: Alex Shifrin

In this episode I sit down with Alex Shifrin to talk about what it actually means to be an ontologist and how ontology work shows up in the real world. Alex shares his path through industry roles at Moody's, Gro Intelligence, and Siemens, and explains how semantic modeling and knowledge graphs create practical value inside large organizations.

We break down what an ontologist does in plain English, how someone gets into the field, and whether it is a career worth pursuing today. We also talk candidly about the job market, how to actually find work, and why experienced practitioners tend to reuse and extend existing ontologies instead of building everything from scratch.

Along the way we cover whether corn is a class, the tradeoffs between solo and team based modeling, and the early warning signs that a knowledge graph project will succeed or fail. If you care about knowledge graphs, semantic web, data modeling, or building systems that make messy data interoperable, this conversation is packed with practical insight.