Semantics

Ossie

Apache Ossie (incubating)

Assess Foundation Apache Software Foundation (incubating) — donated by the OSI Initiative; 50+ organisations including Snowflake, Salesforce, dbt Labs, Databricks, Dremio Since 2025 🏅 Entropy Data pick

Judgement: Assess

Emerging vendor-neutral semantic exchange, now under ASF governance; promising, adoption early.

Vendor-agnostic open standard for exchanging semantic models — datasets, relationships, metrics, and AI context — between BI platforms, AI agents, and analytics tools.

Overlaps with ODCS on datasets and relationships, and adds metrics (e.g. total_revenue = SUM(order_total)) and dynamic fields (e.g. full_name = first_name + " " + last_name). ODCS still owns terms of use, quality, and SLAs.

Launched in November 2025 as the Open Semantic Interchange (OSI) with 17 founding partners, and entered the Apache Incubator as Apache Ossie in July 2026. The spec, the community, and the mission are unchanged — only the name and the governance are.

Renamed from OSI (Open Semantic Interchange) to Apache Ossie in July 2026, partly to end the acronym collision with the OSI networking model and the Open Source Initiative.

Example

Metrics and dimensions defined once, with the SQL expression per dialect, so every tool computes the same number.

semantic_model:
  - name: ecommerce_analytics
    description: Sales and customer analytics
    ai_context:
      instructions: "Use for sales analysis"

    datasets:
      - name: orders
        source: sales.public.orders
        primary_key: [order_id]
        fields:
          - name: order_date
            dimension:
              is_time: true

    metrics:
      - name: total_revenue
        expression:
          dialects:
            - dialect: ANSI_SQL
              expression: SUM(orders.amount)

At a glance

Category
Semantics
Formerly known as
OSI, Open Semantic Interchange
Governance
Apache Software Foundation (incubating) — donated by the OSI Initiative; 50+ organisations including Snowflake, Salesforce, dbt Labs, Databricks, Dremio
Status
Incubating at the ASF since July 2026; spec still early, working groups very active
First released
2025

Links

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