When the Open Semantic Interchange (OSI) initiative launched last year, it set out to solve a problem every data leader recognizes: the same business metric gets defined a dozen different ways across a company's BI tools, warehouses, and now, AI agents. "Monthly active users" in the CRM rarely matches "monthly active users" in the warehouse, and every new AI copilot added to the stack makes the gap more visible, not less.
That initiative has just taken its most consequential step yet. OSI has entered the Apache Software Foundation’s (ASF) incubator and, as part of that transition, has been renamed Apache Ossie (Incubating).
The specification and the community behind it haven't changed. What has changed is the governance model: Ossie now operates under ASF norms, with public mailing lists, GitHub-based development, and committership earned through contribution rather than employer affiliation.
ThoughtSpot was a founding member of OSI, and we're continuing that commitment under its new name and its new home at the ASF. This move strengthens the standard itself and benefits anyone building a data and AI stack who doesn't want to be locked into one vendor's definition of "revenue."
Where ThoughtSpot Has Contributed
Since OSI's founding, our team has been an active contributor across all of its working groups— Metric Language, Catalog, and Ontology—that governs how semantic objects relate to each other.
That's meant sitting in the same room—literally and in GitHub threads—as engineers from Snowflake, Databricks, dbt Labs, Atlan, and other partners, and finding shared ground on how a metric, a dimension, or a join should be described, so that any tool can read it correctly.
An open standard only works if it stays vendor-neutral. Ossie's move to Apache Software Foundation governance formalizes that neutrality, making the standard more durable and more trustworthy for the organizations that will eventually depend on it.
What's Next: A Translation Layer for TML
Looking ahead, we're building a translation layer between ThoughtSpot Modeling Language (TML)—the format ThoughtSpot uses to define and version semantic models—and the Ossie specification.
The goal is to let semantic definitions built in ThoughtSpot move into the broader Ossie ecosystem, and vice versa, without anyone having to hand-translate metric logic between formats. This is an active workstream and we'll share specifics as the translation layer takes shape.
This work connects directly to the ThoughtSpot’s context layer for agents, in which Spotter Semantics already uses deterministic query generation grounded in governed business definitions rather than probabilistic guessing. A shared, open format like Ossie extends that governance beyond ThoughtSpot itself—so the same trusted definitions travel with a query no matter which AI agent, LLM, or platform is running it.
Why This Matters
For a data leader, the pitch for an open semantic standard isn't abstract. It's fewer reconciliation meetings between finance and sales over whose "churn rate" is correct. It's the ability to swap or add a BI tool, a catalog, or an AI agent without re-writing your metric logic from scratch. And as more of the actual querying in your organization gets delegated to AI agents, it's the difference between an agent that guesses at what "net margin" means and one that inherits a definition your team already approved.
We're genuinely energized about where this goes next. Apache Ossie starting incubation with a coalition that has grown from its original founding group to more than 50 participating organizations is a strong signal that the industry wants this problem solved collectively. We plan to keep showing up to that work.
Get involved
Ossie is transitioning to ASF infrastructure as part of incubation. Watch for updates on the new project website, join the development mailing list, collaborate on GitHub and join the Ossie Slack workspace.
If you want to see how a governed semantic layer already works in practice, get a demo of ThoughtSpot.
