Use case · Data governance
Glossary, taxonomy, ontology — one tool, one record.
The data dictionary, the business glossary, and the taxonomy don't have to live in three places. Semlify is the single governed graph that exposes every depth.
The problem
Your governance program is fighting its own tooling.
The business glossary lives in Confluence. The data dictionary lives in Atlan or Collibra. The taxonomy lives in PoolParty (or, more often, in a Google Sheet). The audit log lives nowhere. When a definition changes, three teams have to re-sync four artefacts. They miss steps. The auditor finds them.
The boundary between “glossary”, “taxonomy” and “ontology” is a vocabulary problem, not a product problem. All three are different depths of the same primitive — a typed graph of concepts, governed and exposed through the same API.
The shape
Every change is a record.
Every edit in Semlify produces a ChangeEvent: who, what, when, why. The timeline is the audit log. Tag a known-good state when you ship a release. Diff two tags to show the auditor what changed between Q1 and Q2.
- Six event kinds — create / update / delete / revert / tag / bulk_import
- Author, timestamp, optional human-readable message on every event
- Tag-to-tag diff with added / modified / removed counts
- Audit log exportable via API (Business+ tier)
Validation
Catch the drift before the auditor does.
The Validation panel runs five rules on every edit: orphan concepts, domain/range violations, duplicate prefLabels per scheme, deprecated-but-still-referenced, missing class. Errors block exports. Warnings show in the UI. Issues link to the offending entity.
- Errors: domain violations, missing class, broken references
- Warnings: duplicates, orphans, deprecated-still-in-use
- Click any issue to jump to the affected entity
- Validation results exposed via the API so downstream pipelines can react
Deprecation, not deletion
Retire concepts without breaking downstream consumers.
Mark a concept deprecated. Optionally point at a replacement via `dct:isReplacedBy`. Downstream API clients keep their existing references — but follow the redirect on next sync. Strike-through banners surface the status everywhere the concept appears.
- Optional replacement pointer · downstream auto-redirect
- Free-text reason captured at deprecation time
- Validation panel flags every active relation still pointing at the deprecated concept
- Reactivation is an ordinary update — appended, not destructive
Compliance posture
Built for the people procurement audits.
- Append-only change history — no event is ever destroyed.
- Audit log API for export to your own retention pipeline (Business+).
- Per-tenant data residency in EU or US (Pro+).
- GDPR-aligned from day one — DPA, sub-processors list, SCCs.
- SOC 2 Type I within 12 months of GA, Type II within 24 months.
- Annual third-party penetration test.
One graph. One audit log. One source of truth.
Free workspace. Real governance from day one.