Open Standards Keep Meaning Portable
Meaning Matters · Part 2
Open Standards Keep Meaning Portable
Open semantic standards are not nostalgia. They are a way to keep meaning visible, inspectable, testable, and independent of any one platform.
A data platform helps you manage data. A semantic standard helps you govern what the data means. Confuse those two roles, and organizations risk surrendering semantic independence.
Every few years, someone declares that open semantic standards are obsolete.
The argument usually sounds practical. The market has moved on. Developers prefer simpler formats. Operational platforms need speed and scale. Business users need dashboards, workflows, and applications, not formal models.
There is a grain of truth to this.
Operational platforms should not be judged only by whether they use a semantic standard as their native runtime architecture. Serious systems are layered. They combine SQL, JSON, APIs, graph stores, search indexes, workflow engines, code, and user interfaces.
No one should expect one standard to do every job.
But that does not mean open semantic standards are irrelevant. It means we need to understand what job they are supposed to do.
Open semantic standards give organizations a transparent, inspectable, machine-readable way to represent shared meaning.