Imagine you get an invite from a friend to a dinner party. The host says, “Come casual”. For some (myself included) this may mean wear a T-Shirt and Jeans, but then it could also mean wear a suit jacket and a shirt!
Or think of a dentist, who after your Monday check-up says “Come back next Friday”. Do they mean the next actual Friday or the one after?
Same sentence, two possible outcomes and half the world would show up a week too early!
Without context, even the clearest instructions can lead us astray.
In Telco, we live this problem every day.
Standardisation has paved the way but….
This is where Standardisation comes in. For decades, TM Forum has done the heavy lifting of standardising telco data. APIs like TMF638 (Service Inventory) and TMF639 (Resource Inventory) define how information should be exchanged. They have given us grammar, syntax and paved roads for integration
However there is a blind spot….. Structure does not equal Meaning.
A field labelled “address” might point to a billing location in one system and a geographic coordinate in another. Both would be right in their structure, but the meaning is inconsistent. It’s the ‘Casual Dress’ and ‘Next Friday’ dilemma, technically clear yet practically confusing.
Why meaning matters more than ever!
When humans were the interpreters, these mismatches were survivable. An operator reading a ticket could infer what ‘site’ or ‘address’ meant.
However, in the world we are migrating towards, one filled with Dark NOCs, Agentic AI and Autonomous Networks, there may not always be a human in the loop. Systems need to understand each other without guesswork. There can be no trial-and-error algorithms in this new world.
Automation without understanding has a limit. You can automate processes with scripts and rules, but autonomy, the ability to reason, adapt and explain, only emerges when data carries shared meaning.
Without that, Open APIs risk becoming like a box of LEGO bricks with no picture on the front. The pieces connect beautifully, the structure is flawless, but are you building a castle, a spaceship or just a colourful pile of blocks? Without a picture of the actual design, the individual blocks have no meaning, which would make building the system correctly far more difficult…… unless you had a ‘master builder’ running your network team!
Beyond APIs: The missing standard
Ontologies and the Semantic Web are now firmly on the radar of the TM Forum. Yet unlike service and resource inventories, there is still no industry-ratified Ontology Standard that documents meaning in the same way structure has been documented.
Imagine if we have one:
- A shared semantic dictionary where customer, service and resource meant the same thing everywhere.
- An ontology that underpinned APIs not just their payloads
- A semantic layer that turned today’s silos into a digital twin, where AI could reason across domains instead of stumbling over mismatched definitions.
Interoperability would become more than moving fields around, it would be shared understanding, it is where automation starts to lay the foundation for autonomy.
The box without instructions
We have standardised the bricks. What is missing are the instructions, the shared design that tells us whether we are building a castle, spaceship or just a pile of colourful blocks.
Telco doesn’t need a mythical ‘master builder’ to guess the outcome. It needs a common design so every operator, vendor and AI system can build with confidence.
That design is semantics. Standardising meaning is the next standard the industry must write.
The question is who should write it? Should it be TM Forum (a “TMF-ONT638” to stand alongside TMF638) or should ontological standards live elsewhere?
