What do a badly named car, a NASA spacecraft lost over Mars and a multimillion-dollar banking problem have in common? In each case, people or systems agreed on the words being used without agreeing on what those words actually meant.

This talk explores how semantic mismatches create very real problems across engineering and banking, using examples ranging from major engineering failures to anonymised production code from a Tier-1 African bank.

Johnathan then looks at how BBD is tackling the problem with Rosetta and Rosetta Babel – a canonical banking data model built around BIAN and ISO 20022 – and demonstrates how a shared language can prevent the same misunderstandings from being repeatedly engineered into complex systems.