A database schema tells you how your business stores things. An ontology tells you what your business believes exists. Most teams have only ever written down schemas, and the missing formal ontology unintentionally causes an existential crisis.
Every layer beneath meaning inherits it: the ontology, the operations, the endpoints, the code. Get one word wrong and they are all wrong in the same direction.
Today an LLM leaps straight from a prompt to code, deciding everything in between and writing none of it down. The next era of software engineering fills that gap with real abstraction layers: semantics, ontology, operational model, and execution model. Every handoff checkable, nothing guessed.