Microsoft and Google are backing Apache Ossie, an open source effort to make semantic models portable across competing analytics and AI platforms.
The project has attracted support from more than 60 companies, including Snowflake, Databricks, Nvidia, Oracle, Salesforce, Informatica and Mistral AI. The addition of Microsoft and Google gives Ossie support from two of the largest enterprise tech vendors, strengthening its role as a common format.
A semantic model provides the business meaning behind data. For instance, how a company calculates revenue, and the relationships between that figure’s supporting datasets. But semantic models are often built for individual platforms, so moving to another analytics environment can require developers to recreate the definitions.
Ossie is designed to reduce that problem. Its specification uses JSON and YAML to describe datasets, relationships, fields, metrics and AI context.
Rather than requiring vendors to build direct integrations with every competing platform, Ossie serves as a middle layer. A vendor can build a converter between its own semantic technology and Ossie, which can then exchange models with other supported platforms.
Still an Early-Stage Project
Microsoft is developing a two-way converter for Power BI, allowing Power BI semantic models to move into the Ossie format and Ossie models to be imported into Power BI. The company is also seeking Ossie support for DAX, Power BI’s language for calculations and business metrics, along with greater support for Microsoft ontologies.
Google has not detailed its planned contributions. BigQuery/GoogleSQL is already listed as a supported dialect in the Ossie specification.
While Ossie is promising, a common specification does not mean applications will behave identically. Platforms can handle joins, filters, null values and time calculations differently.
Governance is another issue. The current specification covers core semantic components like datasets, relationships and metrics, but does not treat row-level security, access policies and certification status as first-class elements. Enterprises could still need to recreate those controls after moving a model.
Ossie remains an early-stage project. It is still in the Apache Incubator, and specification version 0.2 is labeled a development draft. Capabilities needed for large, interconnected enterprise models also remain under development.
In other words, while Ossie could give enterprises greater ownership of their semantic models, it is unlikely to make proprietary platform differences disappear. Vendors will continue to offer specialized execution features and extensions.
