Snowflake, Salesforce, dbt Labs, and More Launch Open Semantic Interchange Initiative to Standardize Data Semantics

Sept. 23, 2025 — Snowflake, in partnership with leading industry partners and ecosystem vendors, including Salesforce, BlackRock, dbt Labs, and RelationalAI, announced a bold commitment to lead the Open Semantic Interchange (OSI), a new open source initiative. In today’s AI era, fragmented data semantics across tools and platforms create a major roadblock for both human and AI-enabled analysis.

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This initiative addresses that challenge head-on by introducing a common, vendor-neutral semantic model specification that standardizes how semantic metadata is defined and shared — ensuring consistent business logic across AI and business intelligence (BI) applications.

“At Snowflake, we’ve long believed that interoperability and open standards are essential to unlocking the full potential of AI with your data,” said Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product, Snowflake. “With the Open Semantic Interchange initiative, we are proud to be leading the charge alongside our partners to solve a foundational challenge for AI — the lack of a common semantic standard. This initiative reflects the industry coming together, not competing, to solve shared challenges and build a more connected, open ecosystem for all.”

Advancing Interoperability and AI Innovation

As AI transforms how businesses use data, the need for consistent semantics has never been more urgent. Today, every tool interprets business metrics and metadata differently — causing confusion, slowing adoption, and eroding trust in AI-driven insights. The OSI addresses this challenge head-on with a unified, vendor-neutral specification for business, domain, and industry semantics. With OSI, semantic data is interoperable and reliable across platforms, empowering organizations to scale AI and BI with greater confidence, speed, and trust.

Key goals of the initiative include:

• Enhancing interoperability across tools and platforms: In a fragmented data landscape, organizations often rely on a patchwork of AI, BI, and analytics tools. OSI establishes a shared semantic standard so all tools can “speak the same language,” giving companies the flexibility to adopt best-of-breed technologies without losing consistency in metrics or business logic.
• Accelerating the adoption of AI and BI applications: Many organizations struggle to scale AI and BI because inconsistent semantics undermine trust. By standardizing how semantics are defined and exchanged, OSI ensures data is governed, consistent, and context-rich — enabling more accurate, trustworthy AI insights and faster adoption.
• Streamlining operations and reducing complexity: Without a shared semantic specification, data and AI teams often spend weeks reconciling conflicting definitions or duplicating work across platforms. The OSI eliminates this challenge with a common specification, reducing overhead and freeing data and AI teams to focus on innovation instead of troubleshooting.

Leading Industry Vendors Charge Toward an Open, Interoperable Future

Fragmented data definitions remain one of the biggest barriers to AI adoption, making a shared open standard essential to ensuring semantic consistency wherever data is used. Rather than addressing this challenge in silos, industry and ecosystem leaders are co-leading the Open Semantic Interchange alongside a growing coalition of partners, including: Alation, Atlan, BlackRock, Blue Yonder, Cube, dbt Labs, Elementum AI, Hex, Honeydew, Mistral AI, Omni, RelationalAI, Salesforce, Select Star, Sigma, Snowflake, and ThoughtSpot.

With momentum building as more participants join, this joint effort marks a decisive shift away from closed, single-vendor approaches toward a future built on interoperability, standardization, and open source collaboration. Together, the industry is laying the foundation for trusted, scalable AI adoption and unlocking the next wave of innovation.

Quotes From OSI Members:

• “The future of AI depends on trust—and trust starts with consistent, reliable data,” said Southard Jones, Chief Product Officer, Tableau. “By co-leading the Open Semantic Interchange with Snowflake and our partners, we’re building the foundation every AI agent and BI application needs: a common semantic framework that preserves meaning across platforms. This is the Rosetta Stone for business data, ensuring our customers can harness trusted insights with confidence, no matter where their data lives.”
• “Our focus at dbt Labs has always been to empower data teams to work more efficiently,” said Ryan Segar, Chief Product Officer, dbt Labs. “We see the Open Semantic Interchange as a natural extension of this, as it aims to solve the foundational problem of siloed and incompatible data semantics. By creating a universal language for data definitions, this open source initiative will help data practitioners ensure consistency and reliability, which is essential for scaling AI initiatives.”
• “At BlackRock, we’re constantly seeking ways to enhance data interoperability and drive innovation for our clients,” said Diwakar Goel, Global Head of Aladdin Data, BlackRock. “The Aladdin platform unifies the investment management process through a common data language across public and private markets, helping clients unlock value and scale. We are excited to be part of the Open Semantic Interchange to help establish a common, vendor-neutral specification that will not only streamline data exchange but also accelerate the adoption of AI and business intelligence applications across the financial industry.”

Dive deeper into how Open Semantic Interchange is standardizing and streamlining semantic model exchange in this blog post.

About Snowflake

Snowflake is the platform for the AI era, making it easy for enterprises to innovate faster and get more value from data. More than 12,000 customers around the globe, including hundreds of the world’s largest companies, use Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud to build, use and share data, applications and AI. With Snowflake, data and AI are transformative for everyone.

Source: Snowflake