Bridging the semantic gap between domains

The Enosema Foundation develops international standards for managing concepts and their usage across organizations — in terminology, ontology and semantics.

What we do Become a member

80+

Workshop experts

ISO/IEC

Founding heritage

2021

First workshop

building.concept.yaml

# shared concept register
concept: building
  construction:
    assembled from components,
    seen from the ground up
  geospatial:
    composed of shapes,
    seen from the top down
  linked: true

Our work

Three domains, one mission

Enosema contributes to the mutual understanding of entities by providing insight and clarity to concepts.

Terminology

Standardized terms, definitions and concept hierarchies — managed within a dictionary and reconciled across dictionaries.

Ontology

Explicit models of the relationships between concepts, so people and information systems share one model of a domain.

Semantics

Semantic interoperability: an identical meaning communicated and interpreted across domains, languages and information systems.

Standardization

The technical work programme

Performed by the Technical Committee’s working groups, covering the full lifecycle of shared concepts.

Concept management within a dictionary

Best practices for arranging new concepts in the right place, in relation to concepts already present.

Concept mappings across dictionaries

Identifying identical concepts that use different terms — and different concepts that share the same term.

Version management

Managing every version of a concept and of the relationships between concepts across dictionaries.

History

From workshop to foundation

2021

First Shared Concepts Workshop with ISO/TC 211, SDFE and Ribose — 80+ experts across two sessions

2022

Enosema Foundation established as a US 501(c)(3) tax-exempt, non-profit organization

2022

Joins the Metaverse Standards Forum as a Principal and founding member

From the foundation

View all

February 15, 2026announcements

FERIN Interpretation Companion launched alongside ISO 19135:2026

The Enosema Foundation announces the FERIN Interpretation Companion website, providing practical guidance for implementing ISO 19135:2026's Framework for Extensible Registration of Information.

Reese Plews, Ronald Tse

June 21, 2022announcements

Enosema joins the Metaverse Standards Forum as Principal

Enosema has joined the Metaverse Standards Forum as a Principal and founding member to enable semantic interoperability in the metaverse.

Reese Plews

March 18, 2022announcements

Introducing the Enosema Foundation

The Enosema Foundation is a newly established non-profit standards organization for managing shared concepts.

Reese Plews, Joanna Goodwin, Ronald Tse

Membership

Help standardize shared concepts

Enosema membership is open to all parties internationally — organizations and individuals — through an annual donation.

Membership options Contact us