Healthcare built durable semantic infrastructure not through early tech adoption, but centuries of shared meaning. It aligned on ontologies, controlled vocabularies, evidence standards, and interoperability long before modern data platforms. This foundation, enforced by regulation and public funding, created a model where systems can reason over complex data.

Other industries are now building similar structures. Law uses the European Legislation Identifier (ELI) Ontology, finance relies on the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI), and climate science follows the CF Conventions. The shift is from project-specific data to treating these semantic resources as first-class, open infrastructure.

The lesson is that technical feasibility isn't the barrier—maturity and coordination are. Industries like finance and construction already have community-driven ontologies and vocabularies. The next step is broader adoption, moving from isolated tools to ecosystem-wide standards that enable cumulative, machine-readable knowledge.