Open Semantic Interchange (OSI) / Apache Ossie
What it is
A vendor-neutral, JSON/YAML specification for exchanging semantic models (metrics, dimensions, datasets, relationships) between analytics, BI and AI tools, so a KPI is defined once and agents/BI tools do not each re-define it. OSI has been renamed Apache Ossie (incubating) (GitHub README, ossie.apache.org).
History
- 2025-09-23: Snowflake announced OSI with 16 founding members: Alation, Atlan, BlackRock, Blue Yonder, Cube, dbt Labs, Elementum AI, Hex, Honeydew, Mistral AI, Omni, RelationalAI, Salesforce, Select Star, Sigma, ThoughtSpot (Snowflake blog).
- 2025-11-18: GitHub repository created.
- 2026-06: Financial Services Semantic Working Group launched (project site).
- 2026-06-22: entered the Apache Incubator (incubator status page; project site says accepted July 2026 - minor discrepancy). Champion/mentor JB Onofre; mentors Holden Karau, Zili Chen, Russell Spitzer; 14 committers at fetch. Apache Software Foundation notes incubation does not imply endorsement or maturity.
- Participants named on the project site: Kyvos, Denodo, Snowflake. Reference converters in the repo: dbt, GoodData, Polaris, Salesforce.
Spec status
Core spec in core-spec/ (spec.md, spec.yaml, ossie-schema.json), validation tooling and a TPC-DS example; an ontology/ directory exists. Roadmap (ROADMAP.md): metric semantics and core semantic model, catalog integration, ontology interoperability; later a standard semantic query language, dimension hierarchies and time modelling, AI-native grounded query generation. A formal spec version number was not found. Licence Apache 2.0; about 2.4k GitHub stars.
Relevance
Standard for what dbt (MetricFlow), Cube, AtScale, Snowflake semantic views and Power BI hold in proprietary form; lowers lock-in for semantic-layers-compared. Related: ontology concept note.
Sources (fetched 2026-10-07)
https://github.com/apache/ossie (+ README, ROADMAP) ; https://ossie.apache.org/ ; https://incubator.apache.org/projects/ossie.html ; https://www.snowflake.com/en/blog/open-semantic-interchange-ai-standard/
Open items
- Microsoft support: agy lead claims Microsoft announced Ossie support and a Power BI/Fabric converter on 2026-09-30 (FabCon Europe); not verified against a Microsoft page. AtScale blog also implies Microsoft later aligned.
- Whether MetricFlow’s Apache 2.0 licensing was tied to OSI: the MetricFlow repo is Apache 2.0 (GitHub API) but the open-sourcing date and announcement were not found.
- Current full member list and spec version unknown.