Semantic Metadata Registry
Writing One Architecture at Four Altitudes: Vision Paper → Executive Proposal → Architecture Overview → Technical Specification.
The four documents in this collection describe a single piece of software architecture — a shared semantic layer sitting between raw analytical data and every feature that consumes it (dashboards, AI assistants, reporting tools, and future automation).
What makes them worth presenting together isn't the architecture alone; it's that the same design is deliberately written four separate times, once for each of four audiences, each version answering a different question and containing almost none of the same sentences as the others.
The Four Altitudes
| Document | Question It Answers | Primary Audience | What It Deliberately Omits |
|---|
| 00 Vision Paper | Why does this problem exist in the world at all? | Architects & Product Strategy | Specific company or implementation details. |
| 01 Executive Proposal | Why should we build this now, specifically? | Leadership & Budget Owners | Schemas, field names, and cache-key formats. |
| 02 Architecture Overview | What is it, and how do the pieces talk to each other? | Senior & Systems Engineers | Exact field-level types and storage formats. |
| 03 Technical Specification | Exactly how does it work, field by field? | Implementation Engineers | Persuasion — moves straight to precision. |
The Core Architectural Pattern
Three fears sit underneath traditional semantic layers: