Inhabiting Babel, A Manifesto for Responsible Meaning Engineering

Inhabiting Babel: A Manifesto for Responsible Meaning Engineering in AI, Semantics and Interoperability

This book deconstructs the illusions of semantic automation, AI “understanding,” and universal ontologies.
Core thesis: meaning is neither computable, nor storable, nor transferable.

This manifesto provides a diagnostic framework to identify where semantic and interoperability initiatives structurally fail — before these failures are concealed by tooling, automation, or governance narratives.

Written for data architects, AI practitioners, enterprise architects, and systems engineers who have already confronted the limits of “well-designed” solutions.

Topics include semantic interoperability, knowledge graphs, ontology engineering, AI language models, meaning governance, federated systems, enterprise architecture, and complex systems.

Format: PDF ebook, 65 pages, English

Author: Dr. Nicolas Figay — Expert in interoperability and enterprise architectures (Airbus Defence and Space) — External collaborator of the LIRIS (UMR 5205 CNRS / INSA Lyon / Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1)

Not a manual. A manifesto.
No turnkey solutions — only conceptual lucidity for those who refuse to let technology decide meaning in their place.