Enterprise data and AI architectures are moving faster than ever. As every tool and data platform introduces its own semantic layer to power AI transformations, a fundamental challenge emerges: semantic drift. When your analytics dashboards, ad-hoc query tools, and AI agents interpret business metrics and dimensions differently, trust breaks down.
To solve this, Salesforce co-founded the Open Semantic Interchange—a shared, open standard designed to centralize semantic governance and ensure that metrics like “monthly active users” and “open headcount” mean the exact same thing whether queried by a data analyst or an autonomous AI agent.
Marking a monumental milestone on that journey, the project has entered the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) Incubator under its new name, Apache Ossie (Incubating).
Community-led, community-driven: The power of open governance
The transition to the Apache Software Foundation brings an open, vendor-neutral, and community-driven governance framework to the project:
- No single-vendor control: Decisions, specification updates, and roadmap features are determined through an open discussion-and-vote process by the community, ensuring no single corporation can unilaterally alter or sway the project’s direction.
- Earned committership: Contributions and leadership are earned through active community involvement rather than employer affiliation.
- Public and transparent: Development, mailing lists, and working groups remain fully open to everyone in the data and AI ecosystem.
For our customers and the broader analytics landscape, this open foundation provides lasting confidence that the semantic layer continues to evolve as a shared, accessible industry standard.
Unprecedented industry momentum: From 17 partners to 50+
When we first opened the repository alongside our fellow co-founding partners, we were driven by a shared belief that customers win when business logic is unlocked from proprietary silos.
What started as a coalition of 17 launch partners has quickly grown into a thriving ecosystem of more than 50 organizations across data platforms, transformation engines, BI tools, and AI applications. Across the industry, competitors and collaborators alike have set aside rivalries to contribute to a unified vision.
Salesforce and Tableau have been proud members of this coalition from day one. We contributed the Tableau semantic translator, and we will continue to actively contribute as the community defines the next phase of semantic interoperability. By building natively alongside Apache Ossie, we ensure that Tableau Semantics and connected applications (like Slack via MCP) remain seamlessly aligned with the open standard.
The path ahead: Shaping the future of trusted AI, together
If you’re leveraging Tableau Semantics in Data 360 or already building with the specification, your momentum doesn’t stop—the core specification and your existing models carry forward seamlessly under Apache Ossie.
Looking ahead, the community is already exploring exciting additions to the roadmap, including deeper metric expressiveness and richer ontology definitions for AI reasoning, additional platform converters, a standardized semantic query specification, and tighter integrations with modern catalogs like Apache Polaris.
The future of agentic AI depends on trusted, interoperable data foundations. We invite data teams, developers, and ecosystem partners to join us in shaping this open standard. Explore the project’s new home, engage on GitHub, and help build the future of open semantics.
