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Semantic Communities
A semantic community is a group of people who share the meanings (concepts) of words, phrases, graphic symbols, sounds, etc. by sharing an understanding of their definitions.
Semantic communities can be subcommunities of other semantic communities. A semantic community that is not a subcommunity of any other semantic community can be called a top-level semantic community.
Only top-level semantic communities need to be registered with SemanticCommunity.org. This is because top-level semantic communities provide the entire context for the definition and naming of their subcommunities.
In addition top-level semantic communities are semantic islands where no assumption can safely be made that concepts in two different semantic communities mean the same thing - even if they have the same definition - unless the concept in one of the semantic communities is adopted into the other semantic community. The reason for this is that the words and phrases in a definition also have definitions and a different definition for any word or phrase in any of the referenced definitions means that the concepts in question are two different concepts.
The purposes served by publicly registering top-level semantic communities are:
to provide a globally unique name for the semantic community that accurately reflects the scope of the meanings the understanding of which is shared by members of the semantic community.
to provide a GUID for the semantic community that never changes and ensure that it is globally unique.
to ensure that the ownership of the semantic community is the organization that is responsible for shared meanings within the scope of the semantic community. For example, the top level semantic community for meanings shared among stakeholders of a company needs to be owned and controlled by that company. A regulatory example might be that the semantic community for the concepts in the European Union MiFID II regulatory documents must be owned by the EU organization responsible (ESMA) for the definitions for terms used in those documents.
A speech community is a subgroup within a semantic community who share both preferred and synonymous terms for the concepts; i.e. unique connections between a given word or phrase and a given concept within a given context. Speech communities do not need to be registered publicly because they are completely and uniquely defined and named within the context of their top-level semantic community.
Semantic Community Registtration Support
Request to Register a Semantic Community
Semantic Anchors
A Semantic Anchor is a URL that provides a powerful way to dynamically link a word, phrase or sentence, a document structure element, or a design element, contained in any document or file format that supports HTML hyperlinks, directly back to its business meaning in an unambiguous SBVR-based business glossary, such as Smart Glossary™. Clicking on the Semantic Anchor opens the full glossary entry for the relevant meaning in a context where its semantic relations can be browsed.
Semantic Anchors in Disambiguator™
An automatically generated Semantic Anchor is available to copy In the popup Smart Glossary™ Entry window in Meaning Explorer and Meaning Diagrammer. Simply select the wording being defined in the Smart Glossary™ entry and copy it. The under-the-covers Semantic Anchor URL will be copied along with it. Simply paste what you have copied into any document or field in any file or form that accepts HTML Hyperlinks and you will have a functioning Semantic Anchor. Clicking on the Semantic Anchor opens the full Smart Glossary for the relevant meaning in a context where its semantic relations can be browsed. If the Smart Glossary™ content is private, you will be requested to sign-in. Public content will be displayed without having to sign-in.
For more detailed usage instructions see Copying and Pasting Semantic Anchors
Semantic Anchor Technical Documentation