Constitutional Compatibility

As institutions increasingly adopt semantic systems to govern workflows, policies, and decision processes, the problem of interoperability between these systems becomes central. Existing approaches to interoperability focus on shared protocols, schemas, or platforms, often resulting in fragmentation, vendor lock-in, and incompatible standards. This paper proposes a different approach: rather than attempting to define a single universal standard for institutional semantic interaction, it introduces a meta-map for constitutional compatibility. This meta-map treats interoperability standards themselves as governed semantic artifacts that can be described, compared, and translated through a structured framework. Using the Specification--Configuration--Implementation (SCI) framework and an evaluative principle based on semantic distinction preservation, the paper defines a method for making institutional semantic standards legible as constitutional constructs. This enables pluralism without incoherence, allowing diverse institutions to interoperate through explicitly declared semantic assumptions, authority structures, admissibility regimes, and translation laws. The result is a shift from protocol competition to constitutional cartography, where interoperability emerges not from uniformity but from the ability to understand and lawfully relate distinct semantic systems.