  Despite the fact that Shannon and Weaver's Mathematical Theory of
Communication was published over 70 years ago, all communication systems
continue to operate at the first of three levels defined in this theory: the
technical level. In this letter, we argue that a transition to the semantic
level embodies a natural, important step in the evolution of communication
technologies. Furthermore, we propose a novel approach to engineering semantic
communication using conceptual spaces and functional compression. We introduce
a model of semantic communication utilizing this approach, and simulate
communication of image semantics demonstrating a 99.79% reduction in rate.
