Concepts
New here? Start with the six core concepts. The full registry follows.
Core Concepts
Six ideas explain most of what happens inside a Meaning Room.
Propose a Definition via AI
Explore · never validatedGet an illustrative starting point from one stakeholder’s point of view, then contribute your own perspective.
Category Evidence Artifact
Applicability Matrix: “Wirtschaftlicher Totalschaden”
One ordinary insurance term, two legitimate definitions, and the financial divergence that follows from context alone.
Full Concept Registry
Every validated concept in the canonical registry. When people and AI interpret the same concept differently, inconsistent decisions follow.
Governance
A reviewable record of how a definition or relationship reached its current state.
governance::audit
The single binding definition of a concept within a given namespace.
governance::canonical-definition
Supporting material that justifies a definition or a relationship between concepts.
governance::evidence
The practice of treating definitions as managed organizational assets, with explicit ownership, review, and accountability.
governance::governance
The traceable history of how a concept's meaning evolved across versions and systems.
governance::lineage
The operating model for semantic governance: the processes, tooling, and ownership structures by which an organization maintains canonical definitions across AI systems.
governance::meaning-operations
A governed rule that constrains how definitions are created, changed, or applied.
governance::policy
The documented origin and chain of custody of a definition or relationship.
governance::provenance
The possibility of an adverse outcome; a term whose meaning must be governed because it differs sharply across domains.
governance::risk
The gap between the meanings an organization assumes are shared and the meanings that are actually operative in its systems.
governance::semantic-debt
The gradual divergence of meaning that occurs when a concept is used across multiple systems, teams, or domains without shared governance.
governance::semantic-drift
The discipline of treating definitions as governed organizational assets — explicitly maintained, versioned, and auditable.
governance::semantic-governance
The assignment of accountability for maintaining a specific definition.
governance::semantic-ownership
The discipline of tracking changes to a definition over time so prior meanings remain recoverable.
governance::versioning
Insurance
Meaning
The state in which people, systems, and AI operate from the same definition of a concept.
meaning::alignment
The condition in which a single term carries more than one viable meaning.
meaning::ambiguity
A unit of meaning that a term refers to, independent of the words used to express it.
meaning::concept
The frame of domain, purpose, and audience that fixes which meaning of a term applies.
meaning::context
The act of resolving a term to one binding meaning within a namespace.
meaning::disambiguation
The mechanism that returns the binding definition of a term for a given context.
meaning::resolver
A governed semantic context in which a concept carries exactly one binding definition, specific to a domain, purpose, or framework.
meaning::meaning-room
The full set of meanings a concept can carry across an organization before governance binds it to a canonical definition.
meaning::meaning-space
A single, aligned understanding of a concept across departments, systems, and AI models — the outcome a Meaning Room is designed to produce.
meaning::shared-meaning
A surface label that points to a concept; the same term can map to different concepts across namespaces.
meaning::term
Confidence that a concept means the same thing across the people and systems that rely on it.
meaning::trust