Meet Apache Ossie: The Open Semantic Interchange Finds Its Home at the ASF

In June 2026, a project quietly entered the Apache Incubator that I believe will matter as much to the next decade of data as Iceberg mattered to the last one. It is called Apache Ossie, it was formerly known as the Open Semantic Interchange, and its job is to standardize something the data industry has never standardized: what our data actually means. I have personal stakes to declare, as always. The proposal's champion, Jean-Baptiste Onofré, is a colleague of mine at Dremio, and Dremio is one of the three companies named as core developers of the project alongside Snowflake and dbt Labs. I have been writing about the Open Semantic Interchange since its launch, I flagged its trajectory in my recent articles on Apache Polaris and on agentic AI standards, and watching it arrive at the Apache Software Foundation feels like watching a prediction come true faster than I predicted it. So no, I am not neutral. What I can offer instead is what I always offer: the receipts, the honest caveats, and an explanation built so that anyone can follow it. That last part is the real mission of this article. Ossie lives in a corner of the data world, semantic layers, metrics definitions, ontologies, that even seasoned engineers find foggy, and most coverage of it assumes you already speak the jargon. I want to do the opposite. By the end of this piece, you should understand what problem Ossie exists to solve, what the project actually contains, why it needed a vendor-neutral home, what incubation at the ASF means, and why the timing, in the middle of the AI agent wave, is not a coincidence. No prior semantic-layer knowledge required. The Problem, Told as a Story Everyone Has Lived Forget technology for a moment and consider a Monday morning at a perfectly ordinary company. The head of marketing walks into the leadership meeting with a slide: monthly active users are up 12 percent. The head of product follows with her dashboard: monthly active users are flat. The CFO, working from the