Apache Ossie (Incubating) — formerly the Open Semantic Interchange (OSI) — is an open, vendor-neutral specification for exchanging semantic models between tools. It defines a machine-readable format for describing datasets, relationships, fields, and metrics, along with the business context around them, so that any tool in a data stack can produce or consume semantic definitions without losing meaning.

The project is incubating at the Apache Software Foundation, developed in the open on GitHub, and backed by a coalition of data and analytics vendors. Its goal is to make a business concept like "Monthly Active Users" resolvable consistently across warehouses, BI tools, and AI agents, regardless of where it was originally defined.

What Ossie covers

Ossie standardizes the shape of a semantic layer as an interchange format:

• Semantic models — the top-level unit exchanged between tools.
• Datasets — the queryable tables in a model.
• Relationships — how datasets connect to each other.
• Fields — the dimensions on each dataset.
• Metrics — the measures defined against fields.
• AI context — the descriptions and business meaning consumers (including AI agents) rely on.
• Custom extensions — a custom_extensions slot for tool-specific detail that would otherwise be lost in a round-trip.

How Ossie maps to the Qyra semantic layer

The Qyra semantic layer already models the same building blocks Ossie standardizes:

Qyra will use Ossie as an interchange format for the semantic layer: you'll be able to import Ossie models into a Qyra project, export a Qyra project as Ossie, and round-trip through custom_extensions for detail the base spec does not yet cover.

Where to learn more

• Apache Ossie project site: ossie.apache.org
• Source and spec: github.com/apache/ossie
• Qyra semantic layer: Qyra semantic layer