Business Semantics
Business Semantics
Purpose
Business Semantics are the customer-owned meanings behind workflows, policies, governance artifacts, operational states, cases, corpora, experiments, releases, approval records, and rollback decisions.
FoxCommand does not define, infer, normalize, or adjudicate those meanings. Customer systems decide how business language is represented, governed, changed, reviewed, and interpreted.
What Customers Own
Customer-owned Business Semantics include:
- Workflow names and business process states.
- Policy concepts and governance artifact meanings.
- Review, approval, release, promotion, and rollback meanings.
- Case, corpus, experiment, population, or cohort meanings.
- Risk, compliance, financial, operational, clinical, or domain-specific interpretations.
- The customer system of record for each meaning.
FoxCommand may receive mapped material and customer correlation metadata through current runtime contracts, but that material remains customer-owned context.
What To Capture
For each governed decision, capture:
| Item | Customer-facing question |
|---|---|
| Decision context | What business decision is being evaluated? |
| Source facts | Which customer facts support the decision? |
| Vocabulary | Which terms, values, states, or codes have customer-specific meaning? |
| Evidence | Which records support the source facts or decision context? |
| Ownership | Which team or system owns the meaning and lifecycle of the facts? |
| Change control | How does the customer review or approve semantic changes? |
| Traceability | Which case, release, corpus, review, experiment, or approval identifiers should be preserved? |
| Handling constraints | Which privacy, retention, or data handling rules apply before runtime submission? |
Relationship To Customer Configuration
Business Semantics are not stored or governed by FoxCommand.
Customer Configuration records the durable references that help customer systems repeatedly select, submit, trace, and retain material. Business Semantics explain what that material means to the customer.
Typical relationships:
- A Customer Profile points to customer-owned governance, execution, mapping, credential, and evidence retention references.
- Business Semantics explain the customer meaning of those references.
- Decision Mapping translates the selected meaning into FoxCommand-compatible execution material.
Relationship To Decision Mapping
Business Semantics describe customer meaning.
Decision Mapping defines how customer-owned meaning is translated into material that can target the FoxCommand Decision Surface.
Do not use Decision Mapping to invent missing meaning. If a source fact or value is ambiguous, resolve the meaning in the customer-owned system before mapping it.
Customer Checklist
Before mapping a decision, confirm:
- The decision and source facts have customer-owned definitions.
- The customer system of record is identified.
- Owners and reviewers are known.
- Required evidence and lineage are available.
- Data handling constraints are understood.
- Traceability identifiers are ready to preserve with runtime evidence where supported.
Boundary
FoxCommand produces bounded runtime evidence over submitted material. Customer systems own Business Semantics and decide how returned evidence affects customer lifecycle records.
Next Step
Translate customer-owned meaning through Decision Mapping, then choose the appropriate Decision Surface.