Open Semantic Interchange Renamed Apache Ossie (Incubating)
The Open Semantic Interchange (OSI) project, an open specification for semantic layers and ontologies, has been renamed Apache Ossie (Incubating) as it enters the Apache Software Foundation's incubator program. This change aims to prevent confusion with other projects using the OSI acronym and to establish a vendor-neutral governance structure. The specification and its YAML-based format remain unchanged, ensuring compatibility for existing users, and the project seeks broader community involvement to define future roadmaps, including enhancing expressiveness and building more integrations.
- →Ossie enables standardized business context for tools
- →Project has broad community and contributor base
- →Future roadmap includes spec expressiveness and integrations
Enhancements (3) ›
- Ossie enables standardized business context for tools
Ossie provides a vendor-neutral format for expressing business metrics, dimensions, and their relationships, allowing BI platforms, query engines, and AI agents to consume semantic definitions consistently. This addresses inconsistencies in business concept definitions across different organizational tools.
- Project has broad community and contributor base
The project has seen over 100 commits from contributors at various companies like Snowflake, Salesforce, and Databricks, with a growing coalition of over 50 organizations and active working groups. Reference implementations have been developed, including converters for dbt, Apache Polaris, and Snowflake.
- Future roadmap includes spec expressiveness and integrations
Potential future contributions include deepening the spec's expressiveness for enterprise models, building converters for additional platforms, developing a standardized semantic query specification, and integrating with Apache Polaris for discoverability.
https://www.snowflake.com/content/snowflake-site/global/en/blog/apache-ossie-open-semantic-interchange-incubator