Semantics Evolved

Definitions, Concepts and the Semantic Layer

Most enterprise definition work is graded by the people who wrote it. A working group convenes, argues over whether customer_status_cd = A indicates enrolled, billed, or merely not yet purged, writes a sentence into the catalog, marks the field certified, and closes the ticket. The grading rubric was an agreement amongst six people in the room, all of them internal to a data and/or product team. Not represented are the people who will read that value in eighteen months, from a different team or business unit, but gets encoded anyways, inside a model that was trained on someone else’s schema.

The problem being solved in that room is documentation, not semantics. No one realizes that the problem the organization has is semantic interoperability with populations who were never in the room or invited to the table.