About Us
Who We Are
Interstellar Semantics is an ontology engineering and applied semantics company focused on one thing: making meaning explicit, consistent, and reliable across complex systems.
Modern organizations run on data, standards, regulations, and AI—but too often those systems disagree about what things are, what they refer to, and how they relate. Labels drift. Definitions conflict. Integrations break. AI systems hallucinate. Governance becomes brittle.
We exist to fix that.
What We Do
Interstellar Semantics designs formal semantic foundations that allow data, analytics, and AI systems to reason coherently across domains, platforms, and organizations. Our work centers on:
Ontology engineering & semantic strategy grounded in realist, formal methods (BFO/CCO-aligned)
Cross-system semantic alignment of standards, schemas, regulations, and domain vocabularies
Knowledge graph and graph-based architectures that support reliable analytics and AI
Audit- and compliance-ready semantic foundations for regulated and high-risk environments
We don’t build applications or generative models. Instead, we build the semantic substrate they depend on—so that everything layered above them remains interpretable, explainable, and trustworthy as systems scale.
Our Methods
Most integration and AI failures aren’t technical—they’re semantic. The problem isn’t computation, it’s meaning.
Interstellar Semantics approaches this problem with a definition-first, ontology-driven methodology that makes implicit assumptions explicit, resolves hidden inconsistencies, and anchors systems to shared semantic commitments. Our internal frameworks are designed to align meaning across heterogeneous sources without forcing premature schema mergers or brittle label matching.
The result is systems that are:
More interoperable
More auditable
More resilient to change
Safer to reason over
Our Frameworks
The iSA⁷ (Atomic Seven) Architecture is a three-layer system for constructing, anchoring, and aligning meaning at enterprise scale, designed to function as a kind of universal API for meaning across domains.
iSDN – (definition numbering) a definition-first method that constructs concepts using genus–species logic and formal axioms before applying labels
Atomic Seven (A7) – the seven universal semantic anchors that serve as the minimal ontological frame for all domains
iSMAP – (mapping by axiomatic profiles) an axiomatic-profile mapping method that aligns meaning across ontologies, ISO standards, schemas, regulations, data models, and domain vocabularies
What Sets Us Apart
Network of Experts
While we prioritize doing what we’re best at, we know that most projects are far more than just semantics. That’s why we actively cultivate a network of experts in a variety of SAP and infrastructure subspecialties, in addition to a diversity of subject matter experts. It’s from this network that we option priority subcontractors in order to generate optimal results.
Two Divisions of Knowledge Investment
We split our internal resources and development efforts between careful stewardship of standard-aligned artifacts and ontology innovation. Existing systems cannot be expected to meet every possible semantic need. We have responded to these pressures by developing novel, corpus-grounded meta-ontological frameworks, even formalizing our own top-level ontology to meet these persisting informatic and knowledge representation challenges.
NCOR Membership & Oversight
In addition to our primary team being active members of the National Center for Ontology Research Network, Interstellar Semantics is proud to have John Beverly PhD as an expert advisor.