Semantic tags
Early semantics used to be categoric, so that chair belongs to the wider category of furniture.
However, semantic tags are much better to create meaning, since meaning is a lattice of emerging complexity rather than hierarchies of meaning.
Semantic tags, at the same time, are informed by cultural practices and other assumption (related to our experience to the world). For example, walking assumes, among other things, having legs, the existence of gravity, having muscle control, etc. The key point here is that this process depends on abductive reasoning: hypothesis-building through observations depending on prior knowledge and/or assumptions. Note that abduction requires systems thinking: thinking about relations of objects rather than properties of objects.
Semantic tags, ordered in both hierarchical and non-hierarchical structures (categories and matrices of tags), form cognitive models. Though of course semantics is nothing withouth the whole lobster, ie inputs like a sensory perpection of the world and capacity to interact with it.