Semantic Drift in Taxonomy

Taxonomies age in a way that is invisible to the records using them. A category defined one way in 2019 is applied differently by 2026 as the business changes, so records sharing a term no longer share a meaning — and retrieval scoped to that branch returns an inconsistent set. The drift is gradual and nobody notices, because each individual assignment seemed correct at the time.

Because taxonomy in Centralpoint is maintained as records with version history and terms carry aliases, the meaning in force when a record was classified is recoverable. Re-classification is a controlled operation over a known set rather than a guess about which records were assigned under the old understanding.