Semantic Modeling

Semantic modeling captures what things mean before deciding how they are stored: the business concepts, how they relate, and the rules that constrain them. A semantic model says "a Customer places Orders; an Order has exactly one billing Agreement" — no tables, no keys, no load strategy. Those come later, and in MDDE they come derived: the physical model is generated from the semantic one plus architectural patterns, not designed by hand a second time. The sequencing is the point. When physical structure comes first, meaning gets reverse-engineered out of column names and tribal memory — the platform runs on guesswork. When meaning comes first, every downstream artifact inherits it: business-friendly data modeling makes the semantic model a medium the business can actually read and challenge, and the enterprise ontology gives concepts a home beyond a single project. Within the semantic family, this concept names the activity: semantic design is the design discipline around it, and semantic engineering is the practice of building and maintaining the resulting layer as an engineered artifact.