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Principle Draft

Semantic authority is independent of consumption

Three tools, three answers

The finance dashboard counts active customers as anyone who bought in the last 30 days. The product team's notebook uses 90 days. The new AI assistant, asked how many active customers there are, counts everyone who logged in this month.

Nobody decided any of these definitions. Each tool became the definition because that is where someone had to write the logic.

Accidental authorities

A tool that holds the only definition becomes an accidental authority over the organisation's meaning.

  • Copies of the definition drift, and there is no single place to correct them.
  • Replacing a tool means re-deriving meaning that nobody wrote down anywhere else.
  • The AI assistant answers with the same confidence as the dashboard, and neither can explain why they differ.
  • Divergence starts to be treated as a normal by-product of having several tools, rather than as a defect.

Meaning has an owner; tools do not

Business concepts, relationships, dimensions and metrics need stable, governed identities that exist independently of the technology through which they are consumed. Tools may project, cache, translate or render a definition. Doing so does not make them its authority.

Consumer needs can challenge a definition, extend it or expose its gaps. They do not silently redefine it. Disagreement is legitimate; hidden disagreement is not.

The picture

Accidental authorities versus one governed definition Left: three tools each hold their own definition of active customer, 30 days, 90 days and logged in this month, giving three different counts with no connection between them. Right: one governed definition, active customer version 3, owned by the customer domain, is projected to a BI tool, a notebook, an API and an AI assistant, which all report the same count. Today · each tool defines it BI dashboard bought in the last 30 days 41,200 Analyst notebook bought in the last 90 days 63,900 AI assistant logged in this month 88,450 Three answers, no owner, nothing to reconcile against. Direction · one definition, many projections Active customer · v3 a completed purchase in 90 days owned by the customer domain project · cache · render BI tool Notebook API Assistant 52,310 52,310 52,310 52,310 A change is made once, versioned, and seen everywhere.
Left: each tool has its own copy. Right: one governed definition, projected into every tool that needs it.

One definition, versioned

Illustrative example

The customer domain owns Active customer, version 3: at least one completed purchase in the last 90 days. The BI tool, the notebook, the API and the assistant all ask for it by identity rather than by re-implementing it.

When version 4 excludes staff accounts, the change is made once, reviewed and dated. Every consumer sees the new figure from the same day, and anyone reproducing last quarter's board pack can still ask for version 3.

In detail

What the principle constrains

It constrains where authority lives, not which tools may exist. It does not require removing any tool, however central. It does not say where the authoritative definitions are stored, only that no consumption technology holds that role by default.

Provenance back to the source

Mappings, transformations and consumption-specific metrics should keep a traceable link to the definitions they derive from. A local variant is acceptable when it is declared as a variant; it is a defect when it silently diverges.

The assistant is one more consumer

An AI assistant is a consumption technology like any other. It can interpret a question and explain an answer. It should not decide what active customer means, and it should not reconstruct the calculation on its own. That argument continues in where computation belongs.

Not this

  • Not a central team writing every definition. Authority usually belongs where the meaning originates, which is the subject of the next chapter.
  • Not an argument against BI tools, semantic layers or AI assistants.

Unresolved

  • Where should the authoritative definitions physically live, and how are they served to tools?
  • Who adjudicates a metric that spans several domains and has no single natural owner?

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Next in the argument Put computation where it belongs Data lands at one grain, questions are asked at another, and every report repairs the difference in its own way. Measure, metric and KPI

Connected thinking

Concept · draft Measure, metric and KPI Separate what a number means, how it is evaluated, what it is judged against and how it is shown, and give each its own authority. Concept · draft Semantic layer A semantic layer projects governed meaning into many tools; it does not create that authority. Concept · evolving Semantic flow Concept · evolving Sharing agreement