What you are going to learn
How to describe a piece of data so completely that somebody who was not there, using a system you have never seen, can still read it correctly in ten years.
Most data leaves home half-dressed. A spreadsheet column called bp holds the
number 140. Somewhere else, in a document or a database comment or somebody's head, is the
rest of it: that this is systolic blood pressure, measured in millimetres of mercury, that
the normal range is 90 to 120, that it was taken sitting, that the reading was valid on a
particular morning and is not a claim about today. None of that travels with the 140. So
every system that receives it has to be told again, by a person, and every system that is
not told guesses.
A Semantic Data Charter model is where all of that gets written down once, attached to the value itself, in a form a machine can check. Build the model once and every record made from it carries its own meaning, its own limits, and its own history, wherever it goes.
Who this is for
People who know a subject. Nurses, accountants, logistics planners, laboratory managers, public-health analysts, anyone who can say what a field actually means and when it is wrong. That knowledge is the hard part and you already have it. This teaches you to write it down in a form software can enforce.
Engineers and data people who keep meeting the same problem from the other side: the join that cannot be trusted, the code whose definition nobody can produce, the field that meant something different before the reorganisation.
Students and recent graduates in a domain rather than in computer science. The scarce skill here is not programming. It is knowing what the data means, and then being able to model it.
You do not need to be a programmer. You do not need to know XML, RDF, or any standard by name. You will meet the standards eventually, but as tools rather than as a syllabus.
What the path looks like
The first hour or two. Modules 1 and 2 cover what a model is, what the pieces are called, and how meaning gets bound to a value. At the end of module 2 you have built something and can see the difference between a number and a number that explains itself.
Fourteen to sixteen hours, if you continue. Nine modules take you from a first component to a complete, published, reusable data model, including provenance, governance and the semantic links that connect your model to shared vocabularies.
Certification, only if you want it. All of the material above is free and always will be. There is an examination at the end for people who want a credential a client or an employer can check, and that is the only part that costs anything. The exam fee is on the certification page. Passing it issues a numbered credential with a public verification page, which means an employer can confirm it without asking us.
You can stop at any point. Most people who read module 1 will never sit the exam, and that is a perfectly good outcome. The purpose of this material is that more people can model meaning properly, not that more people buy something.
If you are here to build a practice
The same curriculum serves consultants and firms who want to deliver this work to clients, and there is a page written specifically for that case: what the offering looks like, how the credential fits, and what to sell. It is on the practitioners page. If that is not you, ignore it; nothing in the curriculum assumes you have clients.
Where to start
Straight into module 1. If you would rather see the whole shape first, the curriculum index lists all nine modules with what each one covers. If you want to know why any of this matters before you spend an hour on it, the five questions page is the short version of the argument.
Questions as you work through it are welcome at contact@axius-sdc.com.