Salesforce wrote on August 20, 2026 that the Open Semantic Interchange project has entered the Apache Software Foundation Incubator under the name Apache Ossie (Incubating). The project is an open standard meant to keep business metrics and dimensions consistent across analytics tools and AI agents so definitions such as monthly active users do not drift between systems.

Salesforce co-founded the effort to centralize semantic governance as every data and AI product adds its own semantic layer. Moving into Apache brings vendor-neutral governance: public discussion and votes, earned committership, and open mailing lists. Salesforce said the coalition has grown from 17 launch partners to more than 50 organizations spanning data platforms, transformation engines, BI tools, and AI applications.

Why semantics matter for agents

The company argues that AI agents amplify semantic drift because automated systems will act on whatever metric definition they inherit. A shared interchange is meant to keep dashboards, ad-hoc query tools, and agents aligned on the same business logic without locking customers into a single proprietary semantic store.

Decoded Take

Apache incubation is the credibility move semantic standards need when vendors otherwise ship competing metric catalogs. Adoption still depends on engines and BI tools implementing Ossie rather than advertising logos. Watch whether Snowflake, Databricks, dbt, and major BI vendors ship concrete connectors and conformance tests, or whether Ossie stays a governance story while production agents keep hard-coding metrics in prompts.