Today we’re proud to put our name in with some other great companies forming the Open Semantic Interchange initiative.
Semantic metadata has gone from niche to hot really quickly, as it’s become increasingly obvious how central it is to accurate data analysis with AI. And now, we have a group of companies jointly committing to making sure there are well-defined interchange formats for this information (just as Iceberg has become the defacto format for the underlying data itself).
This consortium is the culmination of a lot of discussions, sparked in part by our release of Semantic Sync earlier this year, which pushed forward a vision of semantic models being more interoperable. We think portability is great for customers, who are rightfully leery of being locked in (as often happens).
Even as we’ve built the ability to author semantic models in Hex, we’re doing it in a way that will make it easy to take that information elsewhere, if you want – we want to lock you in with an awesome product experience, not a proprietary yaml format.
As a consortium we’re just at the starting line and there’s a lot to figure out (including how we avoid the inevitable xkcd 927 situation!) but we think it’s worth running at. We're excited to join Snowflake and our fellow partners in this important initiative. To learn more about the Open Semantic Interchange, read Snowflake's announcement here.