2026-09-30 AI and semantic layers

This month, returning presenter Will Martin will be joining us to tell us about
From Open Storage to Open Meaning: How Apache Ossie (Incubating) Completes the Open Data Lakehouse

Will writes:
The open data lakehouse has a solid data foundation thanks to Apache Iceberg and Apache Polaris: an open table format and catalog any query engine can share without lock-in. But openness in storage doesn't mean openness in meaning. Business context, like “revenue” and “active customer”, tends to sit in downstream systems, like notebooks and BI tools. These definitions tend to not agree and they don’t travel well between systems. That is, until Apache Ossie (Incubating), the newly Apache-incubated open spec for semantic layers and ontologies, backed by Snowflake, Dremio, Databricks, dbt Labs, and Salesforce.

This talk will explain the current open data lakehouse stack and introduce Apache Ossie (Incubating). We’ll discuss how open source projects provide vendor-neutral options without sacrificing performance, and why shared semantics is the next open standards fight in this age of agentic analytics.

Please be punctual, the event is hosted by our loyal hosts at Barclay's Eagle Labs in their Platf9rm offices, supported by Silicon Brighton and sponsored by Rittman Analytics.