Meaning Belongs to the Commons: Why We're Excited About Apache Ossie

Coginiti signed on to the Open Semantic Interchange in January, when the v0.1 specification went live under Apache 2.0. In June, OSI became Apache Ossie (incubating), accepted into the Apache Incubator with JB Onofré as champion and Onofré, Russell Spitzer, Holden Karau, and Zili Chen as mentors. The repository now lives at github.com/apache/ossie. The old one is being archived.

We think this is the most important thing that has happened to the semantic layer conversation since the initiative launched. Not because the spec changed. It didn't. Because the governance changed, and for a standard whose entire job is to be trusted by parties who compete with each other, governance is the product.

A standard is a promise about who gets to decide

Here is the awkward structural fact about OSI at launch. Snowflake convened it. Snowflake did the right thing, and doing the right thing does not dissolve the problem: a vendor-neutral interchange format announced by a vendor asks its participants to accept an asymmetry. Everyone contributes business logic to a shared format. One participant also controls the venue.

That asymmetry does not require anyone to act badly. It only requires everyone to anticipate that someone might. A competitor evaluating whether to encode its customers' metric definitions in your format is not asking whether you are trustworthy today. It is asking what happens in year four, when the format's roadmap and your product roadmap point in different directions. Absent a structural answer, the rational move is to hedge, and a standard that everyone hedges against is not a standard. It's a format with good press.

Donating the project to the Apache Software Foundation is a structural answer. The ASF holds the trademark. Releases require a vote of the project management committee, not a decision by a sponsoring company. Merit accrues to individuals, not employers, and it does not expire. Committership is earned by contribution and cannot be purchased. Twenty-five years of institutional design at the ASF has been, in the main, an elaborate mechanism for making capture expensive.

The Ossie proposal says this plainly. Its interest in joining the ASF is "governance alignment, not brand leverage." That sentence is the whole reason we are writing this post.

What we are actually watching for

Enthusiasm is cheap. Here is what we think determines whether this works.

Committer diversity. The proposal is candid that core development currently spans three companies, and it names homogeneous developers as a known risk rather than burying it. Incubation graduation should be gated on whether that changes. Watch the commit logs, not the logo wall.

The expression language. Ossie today standardizes structure: semantic models, datasets, fields, metrics, dimensions, relationships. The hard part, a portable expression syntax that survives translation across dialects, is a working group, not a solved problem. The current spec leans on per-dialect expression strings. That is honest and it is also not yet interchange in the strong sense.

Whether the neighbors show up. The roadmap points at Apache Polaris integration, Spark and Iceberg converters, and a semantic query standard. Ossie is the first ASF project we can think of whose success depends less on its own code than on adjacent projects agreeing to read it.

Version 0.1 is version 0.1. Fifty-plus organizations, five working groups, a financial services vertical group that held its first meeting in June. Momentum is real. Momentum is not the same as a stable specification, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling.

Why this matters for what we build

We have argued for a while that the industry conflates two different activities. Defining a metric is one thing. Operationalizing meaning, actually executing against the definition, tracing where it came from, governing how it changes, exposing it to agents that will act on it, is another. The first is a modeling problem. The second is an engineering problem, and it is where the confidence-reality gap opens up: dashboards that agree on the word "revenue" and disagree on the number.

Ossie addresses the first problem, and it addresses it well. A vendor-neutral, machine-readable format for definitions and their relationships is exactly the right foundation. It is a foundation, not a building. The specification does not tell you how a definition gets executed against your warehouse, how it version-controls, how it survives a schema change upstream, or how an agent should be constrained by it at query time.

That gap is not a criticism of Ossie. It is the correct division of labor. Standards define the interface. Platforms implement it. The healthiest possible outcome is one where the definition layer is a commons and vendors compete on execution, governance, lineage, and developer experience. We would rather compete there than compete on who owns your metric definitions, because we do not think anyone should own your metric definitions.

That is why we joined in January, and it is why the move to the ASF is the news. Coginiti builds on open foundations because operationalizing meaning at enterprise scale is hard enough without also fighting the format. If your semantic definitions are portable, you are free to leave. We think that is the right constraint to design under.

Apache Ossie (incubating) is at ossie.apache.org. The specification, the working groups, and the discussions are open. If you have opinions about what "revenue" means, the community would like to hear them.

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Apache Ossie is an effort undergoing incubation at The Apache Software Foundation, sponsored by the Apache Incubator. Incubation status is not a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code.