A number of data companies—including Snowflake, Salesforce, BlackRock, dbt Labs, and RelationalAI—have announced the formation of a new open source initiative to create a vendor- neutral standard for defining and sharing semantic metadata.
The Open Semantic Interchange has three main goals: enhance interoperability across tools and platforms, accelerate adoption of AI and BI applications, and streamlining operations.
According to the group, organizations rely on a patchwork of AI, BI, and analytics tools, and this initiative will develop a shared semantic standard that allows these tools to “speak the same language.”
By standardizing how semantics are defined and shared, the Open Semantic Interchange hopes to ensure that data is governed, consistent, and context-rich, helping with adoption of AI.
And finally, by having a standard, teams won’t have to spend time reconciling conflicting definitions or duplicating work across platforms, which can be time-consuming.
“At Snowflake, we’ve long believed that interoperability and open standards are essential to unlocking the full potential of AI with your data,” said Christian Kleinerman, EVP of product at Snowflake. “With the Open Semantic Interchange initiative, we are proud to be leading the charge alongside our partners to solve a foundational challenge for AI — the lack of a common semantic standard. This initiative reflects the industry coming together, not competing, to solve shared challenges and build a more connected, open ecosystem for all.”
