I hope your long winter’s nap was enjoyable and your festivities brought you close to family and loved ones this season. .I hope you’re happy to be back at it—at least a little—in 2026.
All of us here at Firehead wish you the best for the coming year. I think it holds a lot of potential.
I also wanted to start this year with a question for you, dear reader. The quick version is “What should we call this work?” From my experience in industry, I’m seeing a naming debate about where we’re going with our application of semantic technologies in knowledge work.
This situation, to me, echoes the early days of “content strategy,” when practitioners converged (slowly) on a term that could hold process, governance, and outcomes together, with such disparate needs. We’re at a similar moment, and clarity matters.
Here’s the crux: we need a name that communicates outcomes and governance to non‑specialists, without inviting “magic AI” expectations.
Several labels are floating around. None is perfect; some mislead:
- Semantically‑enabled services: precise mechanism, but clunky and service‑centric; doesn’t speak to user outcomes.
- Content engineering: established, but tool/pipeline‑heavy; can ignore governance and outcomes.
- Semantic services: short, but academic/vague.
- Knowledge‑powered services: outcome‑oriented, but broad; begs “what knowledge, governed how?”
- Governed semantic services: accurate and safe/explainable, but a mouthful for non‑specialists.
My working stance: pick a name that puts governance and outcomes in the foreground, not hype. It’s making the last step in our KOS series hard to write because I don’t know what to call the services in a way everyone understands. (Am I looking for a new collective noun term equivalent to “a gaggle of geese?” Maybe.)
I want clients and people outside our field to understand the results we provide. Clear naming also helps communicate value.
In the past, I advised: if stakeholders resonate with “semantic services,” use it – provided your playbook requires context binding, provenance, and explainable ranking.
Now, with the explosion of applications and services possible on the market, do we stay with that? Is there something better? And can we agree on it in 2026, please?
My open question: Which term would help your organisation adopt these practices—without inviting “magic AI” expectations—and stay portable across tools?
Guiding criteria (add, challenge, or reorder as you see fit):
- Centres outcomes for users
- Signals governance (context binding, provenance, explainable ranking)
- Avoids hype and ambiguity
- Works across tools and vendors
- Makes sense to non‑specialists
Share your suggestion and why in the comments, or email me at cj@firehead.net. I’ll compile responses and do a short follow‑up comparing options with examples.
