A model of an enterprise and its relationship to semantic domains it operates on.

This model can be used to:

• Establish a shared terminology and drive understanding of enterprise information pathways
• Document a particular enterprise - mission, stakeholders, concerns, …
• Continously adjust the enterprise to improve its efficiency by identifying and refining views, messages, channels and other elements

One way to think about improvement of efficiency is minimization of the “loss function” - total amount of effort required to successfully pass messages between stakeholders. I.e. the receiving stakholder(s) fully understand the intent of the sender stakholder(s). This function is highly dependent on the structure of the enterprise. For example, a co-located team of senior developers might need just a whiteboard. At the same time an open source project with multiple contributors and consumers/users from around the globe wouldn’t be able to function with just a whiteboard.