Breaking Down Semantic Silos: Microsoft Ecosystem Support Comes to Apache Ossie (Incubating)

The Open Semantic Interchange (OSI) initiative launched with industry leaders and ecosystem partners to pave the way for a more open, interoperable and intelligent data landscape. Donation of the project to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) as Apache Ossie (Incubating) marked another step toward a vendor-neutral standard that helps organizations reuse semantic definitions across platforms and reduce dependence on proprietary formats. A true open standard for semantic definitions requires broad industry adoption, active community contribution and interoperability across heterogeneous analytics engines.

Today, it is exciting to see engineers from Microsoft join the Apache Ossie community. With the introduction of the initial Power BI Ossie converter, organizations can begin exploring bidirectional conversions between Power BI models and other Ossie-compatible semantic models, such as Snowflake® Semantic Views, using Ossie as an intermediate format. Furthermore, Microsoft has declared its commitment to Apache Ossie to help advance an open, interoperable semantic foundation for AI-driven analytics. While there is still work ahead, these early steps help enable architectures that maintain consistent metric definitions across platforms, reducing the need to duplicate data or rebuild models.

This effort reflects growing community involvement across the ecosystem. Over the past six months, Apache Ossie has reached over 400 GitHub stars with participation from 48 organizations. With active contributors engaging in over 70 community discussions, the community recently published a roadmap focused on semantic governance, reusable models, verified queries, AI-native semantic systems and interoperability. Together, contributors are working toward an open foundation for managing and aligning enterprise semantic definitions.

Expanding semantic portability across ecosystems
A core component of semantic layer portability is the ability to map standard open definitions into vendor-specific representations without loss of expression. The addition of the Microsoft converter provides a concrete path for translating Ossie semantic models into structures native to Microsoft tools, including Tabular Model Definition Language (TMDL). This work allows organizations using Snowflake Semantic Views and Apache Ossie to convert semantic definitions between Microsoft Fabric and Power BI semantic models, preserving data model relationships and metric calculations without duplicating underlying data assets. In practice, a Snowflake customer defining key semantic concepts (metrics and dimensions) such as recurring revenue or customer churn will be able to share these concepts with Power BI semantic models, helping eliminate semantic discrepancies across analytic clients.

In tandem with structural conversion, recent updates to the specification introduce Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) support as an Ossie-recognized query expression language. Incorporating DAX directly into the framework means that complex measure logic defined in Microsoft environments can be represented in Ossie models. These technical capabilities are the direct result of collaborative engineering within the Apache Ossie community. We want to acknowledge the contributors from the Microsoft team who authored these additions and submitted the converter codebase and DAX specification update directly through the ASF incubation process.

Open standards succeed when key platforms actively maintain and enhance the underlying project rather than building proprietary wrappers. Microsoft's engagement in Apache Ossie demonstrates a shared commitment to vendor-neutral semantic interoperability. We encourage developers and data engineers to review the new Microsoft converter codebase and the DAX expression pull request and to participate in the ongoing development of Apache Ossie as we continue to expand standard coverage across the ecosystem.

Building an open semantic standard
Apache Ossie (Incubating) aims to serve as an open semantic standard for enterprise analytics and AI. By working to reduce platform lock-in at the semantic layer, Apache Ossie helps establish consistent definitions across lakehouses, BI tools and applications. We encourage data teams and partners to participate in the Apache Ossie community and help shape this evolving effort.