Open Semantic Interchange launches to standardize business definitions
Snowflake, Salesforce, dbt Labs, RelationalAI and other companies announced the Open Semantic Interchange, an effort to create a vendor-neutral format for semantic definitions.
A metric defined in three tools is three metrics. On September 23, 2025, a group of data and analytics companies announced a shared format meant to fix that: the Open Semantic Interchange (OSI).
What was announced
- A shared format for semantic definitions, so metrics, dimensions and relationships can move between tools without being rewritten.
- Led by Snowflake, Salesforce, dbt Labs and RelationalAI, with 17 founding members in total.
- Open and vendor-neutral by intent, with a specification to follow.
Why it matters
Every BI tool, warehouse and agent platform has its own way of recording what a metric means, and the copies drift. A common format will not make them agree on its own, but it makes one source of truth possible.
A file that moves cleanly between tools carries whatever was decided, right or wrong. If two teams disagree about what counts as revenue, OSI will carry the disagreement faithfully.