AtScale Joins Snowflake's OSI to Forge a Universal Data Language for AI

BOSTON, MA – January 27, 2026 – AtScale, a long-time provider of universal semantic layer solutions, has officially joined the Open Semantic Interchange (OSI), a major industry initiative led by the AI Data Cloud company, Snowflake. The move signals a concerted effort to solve one of the most persistent and costly problems in enterprise technology: the lack of a common language for business data. By contributing over a decade of practical experience, AtScale aims to help the OSI create a vendor-neutral standard that ensures data definitions remain consistent across the myriad of tools, platforms, and AI models used by modern organizations.

For years, enterprises have struggled with a digital “Tower of Babel.” Key business metrics like “quarterly sales” or “customer churn” are often defined differently in a company’s business intelligence dashboards, data science notebooks, and financial reports. This fragmentation leads to conflicting numbers, eroded trust in data, and significant time wasted by data teams trying to reconcile discrepancies. With the rise of generative AI, which relies on a clear understanding of business context to provide accurate answers, this problem has escalated from a persistent annoyance to a critical roadblock for innovation.

The Alliance to Standardize Data's Meaning

The Open Semantic Interchange was launched to address this challenge head-on. Its mission is to create a common, open-source specification for defining semantic metadata—the layer that translates raw data into understandable business concepts. By establishing a universal, vendor-agnostic standard, the OSI aims to function as a “Rosetta Stone for business data,” enabling organizations to define their metrics and business logic once and have it be understood consistently everywhere, from a Tableau dashboard to an OpenAI-powered chatbot.

Led by Snowflake, the initiative has rapidly gained momentum, attracting a broad coalition of partners from across the data ecosystem. The working group includes major players in business intelligence (Salesforce, Qlik, ThoughtSpot), data governance (Alation, Collibra), data engineering (dbt Labs, Coalesce), and AI (Databricks, Mistral AI). This widespread collaboration underscores a powerful industry consensus: the era of proprietary, siloed data definitions is unsustainable, and the future depends on open, interoperable standards.

"Unlocking the full potential of data and AI requires a common foundation, and the Open Semantic Interchange is the critical step in building that bedrock," said Josh Klahr, Director of Analytics Product Management at Snowflake. "Our collaboration with partners like AtScale establishes a unified, vendor-neutral standard for semantic data, ensuring clarity and consistency across the entire ecosystem."

Beyond Theory: AtScale's Decade of Real-World Expertise

While many participants bring valuable perspectives to the OSI, AtScale’s inclusion is significant for the depth of its practical, battle-tested experience. For more than a decade, the company has specialized in deploying enterprise-grade semantic layers for some of the world's largest and most complex organizations, including Home Depot and Fidelity. This work has given AtScale a unique understanding of the real-world challenges that a universal standard must address.

AtScale’s expertise is particularly deep in the realm of multidimensional semantic modeling, the foundation of legacy OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) systems like Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) and Cognos. As enterprises migrate from these powerful but closed systems to modern cloud platforms, they often struggle to preserve the complex business logic, hierarchies, and aggregation rules built up over years. AtScale has focused on solving this exact problem, developing methodologies to translate and preserve this logic in a cloud-native environment.

This experience is codified in AtScale's Semantic Modeling Language (SML), a mature, production-proven specification used to define business logic in a portable format. By bringing this knowledge to the OSI, AtScale helps ensure the new standard is grounded in the practical requirements of enterprise-scale deployments, not just theoretical ideals.

"We have long believed that the semantic layer is foundational for scalable enterprise AI, but it must be open to be effective," said David Mariani, CTO and Founder of AtScale. "By participating in the Open Semantic Interchange, we're contributing over a decade of experience migrating enterprises from closed proprietary systems to open, cloud-native semantic architecture to help ensure the standard reflects real-world complexity while preserving choice and interoperability across tools."

A Strategic Play in the Semantic Layer Landscape

AtScale's decision to join the OSI is also a strategic move within the increasingly competitive data analytics market. The semantic layer has become a critical battleground as vendors race to become the central hub for an organization's business logic. The fact that direct competitors like dbt Labs, Cube, and others are also participating in the OSI highlights a monumental shift in the industry. Instead of competing to create a dominant proprietary standard, key players are now collaborating to build an open foundation that benefits the entire ecosystem.

This collaboration is central to Snowflake's 'AI Data Cloud' strategy. The company recognizes that for its platform to be the bedrock of enterprise AI, the data within it must be easily and consistently understood by any application. A fragmented semantic landscape is a direct threat to this vision. By facilitating the OSI, Snowflake is not attempting to own the standard but to enable an ecosystem where data can flow freely and intelligently, thereby increasing the value of its own platform.

For customers, the promise of this vendor-neutral approach is immense. It offers a path away from vendor lock-in, where business logic is trapped inside a single BI tool or data platform. With a successful open standard, enterprises can gain the flexibility to choose the best tools for the job without having to rebuild their core metrics and definitions each time.

The Path to a Unified Data Ecosystem

The ultimate goal of the OSI is to deliver on the promise of a truly unified data ecosystem, where business logic is portable, governed, and accessible to both human analysts and AI agents. AtScale's platform already operates on this principle, enabling large enterprises to define governed metrics that work consistently across cloud data platforms like Snowflake, Databricks, and Google BigQuery, and are consumed by a wide range of tools, from Power BI and Excel to custom generative AI applications.

To ensure transparency and true neutrality, the OSI's governance is designed to evolve. While Snowflake is currently facilitating the initiative, there is a stated commitment to transition the project to a neutral, foundation-led model as it matures. The first version of the OSI specification is already available in a public GitHub repository under an Apache 2 license, and a dedicated project website has been launched to track progress and community involvement.

By aligning its proven multidimensional modeling approach with the OSI's open framework, AtScale is not only contributing its expertise but also reinforcing its commitment to an open ecosystem. This collaboration represents a critical step toward turning the long-held industry dream of a single source of truth into a practical, achievable reality for enterprises worldwide.