WebMEM™

The Protocol for Structuring, Delivering, and Conditioning Trust-Scored AI Memory on the Open Web

Semantic Proximity

Semantic Proximity is the contextual closeness between two or more concepts, entities, or data points within a piece of content. In the WebMEM Protocol, it is a key factor in how retrieval agents and AI systems interpret relationship strength, assign trust weight, and determine content relevance.

🧠 Full Definition

Semantic Proximity measures the meaningful distance between related concepts — not just their keyword overlap. It is determined by co-occurrence frequency, relational context, and structural positioning within both human-readable and machine-readable layers.

For example, in a Medicare plan page, placing a plan’s name, star rating, enrollment count, and CMS citation in the same Structured Retrieval Surface creates strong semantic proximity. This positioning helps AI systems connect the plan entity directly to its trust signals.

📜 Role in the WebMEM Protocol

Semantic Proximity is a retrieval-layer design variable. In WebMEM, it is reinforced through:

  • Glossary-scoped Semantic Data Templates where related fragments are co-located
  • Embedding citations and provenance markers within the same fragment as the target entity
  • Aligning human-visible layout with fragment-level bindings for consistent machine parsing

This ensures that entity–fact–source groupings are preserved across both visible and invisible content layers.

💡 Why It Matters

AI retrieval engines weight information not only by what is said, but by how close related elements are positioned semantically. Higher proximity improves:

  • Entity recognition and disambiguation
  • Truth signal weighting
  • Contextual alignment in multi-source synthesis

By reducing conceptual distance between facts, entities, and sources, publishers ensure that AI systems extract and rank the intended connections more accurately.

⚙️ How It Works

Semantic Proximity can occur:

  • Within a paragraph (natural language proximity)
  • Within a data block or table (structured proximity)
  • Across markup layers (Schema.org + HTML + metadata proximity)

🗣️ In Speech

“We moved the CMS citation directly beneath the plan name to maximize semantic proximity between the entity and its source.”

🔗 Related Terms