Why does data I export from one platform mean nothing to the next one?

The EU Data Act (effective September 2025) and the Digital Markets Act both require platforms to let users export their data in a machine-readable interoperable format, but neither law requires that a receiving platform can understand what the data means. A JSON dump of your project history, notes, or accounting entries is syntactically valid but semantically opaque to any competing tool because every platform has its own data model with different field names, relationships, and units. The Data Transfer Initiative's portability compendium identifies this semantic layer as the central unresolved gap: format standardization is tractable but meaning standardization is not. The EU's Data Interoperability Rolling Plan for 2026 acknowledges the need for semantic standards but schedules implementation years out, leaving the current wave of DMA compliance exercises producing exports that technic