Vocabulary

SMF uses a small set of plain words. Engineers will find the matching technical names in the reference.

The core five

Word	Meaning	Gross margin example
Term	The words people and tools use	"gross margin", "GM", "gross margin %"
Concept	The umbrella business idea a term points to	Gross Margin
Perspective	A legitimate, owned meaning of a concept. Two things can be true	Product · Service · Consolidated
Context	The situation of a question: who's asking, where, for what	Product review, services review, board deck, leadership meeting
Metric Contract	The agreed definition of a number for one perspective: what it measures, how it's calculated, what's included, who owns it, where it may be used, what it can be compared with	Product Gross Margin contract

Semantic Contract is the umbrella for SMF's two contracts: the Metric Contract for numbers, and the Definition Contract for business terms that aren't numbers (Customer, Active Customer, Region). See contracts-in-context.md for how they sit alongside data contracts and metric catalogs.

How they connect:

Term "gross margin"
   └─ points to → Concept: Gross Margin
                     ├─ Perspective: Product       → Metric Contract: Product Gross Margin
                     ├─ Perspective: Service       → Metric Contract: Service Gross Margin
                     └─ Perspective: Consolidated  → Metric Contract: Consolidated Gross Margin
Context (e.g., services review) → selects the Service perspective
Context (e.g., leadership meeting) → can't select → ask "which gross margin?"

The five answers

Whenever a person or tool asks "what does this term mean here?", there are exactly five valid answers:

Answer	When	What to do
Use it	One perspective clearly applies	Proceed, and name the perspective
Use the replacement	The term or definition was retired	Use the named replacement, and say so
Ask	Several perspectives apply and context doesn't decide	Ask which one, showing the options
Flag the conflict	Owners disagree and nothing is decided yet	Don't choose; say who owns the decision
Not governed	Nobody has defined this term	Don't present an answer as official

Guessing is never one of the answers.

Other words

Word	Meaning
Definition Contract	The agreed meaning of a business term, with its perspectives, classification rules and owners (template: definition-contract.md)
Data Contract	Not an SMF artifact: a promise about a dataset (e.g., ODCS). SMF contracts link to data contracts
Owner	The person accountable for a concept, perspective or Metric Contract within a scope
Enterprise default	The perspective an answer rule names for specific enterprise contexts, such as board and external reporting. It is not a fallback for every company-wide question; when context doesn't match a rule, ask
Classification rule	What counts as an instance, e.g., what makes a customer "active". Part of meaning, not measurement
Comparability	Whether two metrics can be compared or combined. Part of every Metric Contract
Answer rule	The written rule for which perspective a term resolves to in which context
Conflict	A declared, owned disagreement that hasn't been decided yet
Check	A test that a report or AI tool used the intended meaning
Claim trace	The record that backs up a specific reported number
Meaning owner	The person accountable for what a concept or perspective means within a scope
Metric owner	The person who approves a Metric Contract and its changes
Steward	The person who writes and maintains definitions, answer rules and checks
Enterprise authority	The person or small forum that sets enterprise defaults and decides cross-functional conflicts
Builder	The person who implements definitions in reports, semantic layers and AI tools
Consumer owner	The person accountable for how a report suite or AI assistant uses meaning
Checker	The person who runs checks and keeps the evidence
Build record	Where a contract is implemented, and whether that build matches the contract
Change note	What changed in a definition, why, and from when

Words SMF avoids

Avoided	Why
"Single source of truth"	Conflicts with two things can be true
"Domain" as a core term	Overloaded (data mesh, org units, DNS). Perspective is used instead
"Proof" of numbers	A trace shows how a number was produced; it doesn't guarantee the data is right