The discipline of treating definitions as governed organizational assets — explicitly maintained, versioned, and auditable.
Semantic Governance
In Context
Semantic governance sits alongside data, information, and AI governance, but addresses a different layer: not how data is handled, but what it actually means. It sets the policy for how definitions are agreed, owned, and protected. This becomes operational through Meaning Operations — the day-to-day practice that keeps those definitions alive as the organization changes.
Read More
For the full discussion, see the essay Semantic Governance.
Why This Matters
Governance becomes effective only when the concepts being governed are understood consistently. You cannot hold people or systems accountable to a definition no one has agreed on.
See It In Practice
How the same term — “Incident” — is understood differently across domains:
- Security
- → Breach event
- Operations
- → Service disruption
- Compliance
- → Reportable event
- AI Team
- → Model failure