Semantic Design

Semantic design is the discipline of defining what data means once, deliberately and top-down, so that every downstream layer — logical model, physical model, pipeline, report, AI-context — inherits that meaning instead of re-inventing it. Semantics start at the top: the definition, the relationship, the business rule are designed before the plumbing, and everything below refers back to them. The opposite is bottom-up accretion, where meaning is guessed and re-derived at every layer and drifts apart. Where Semantic Data Engineering is the runtime method (pipelines carry semantics) and Enterprise Ontology is the vocabulary (the agreed core concepts), Semantic Design is the design-time act that produces them: decide meaning once, reuse everywhere.