Is The Universal Semantic Layer The Next Big Data Battleground?
datanami, Monday, July 1st, 2024
We've entered a period of punctuated equilibrium in the evolution of big data over the past month, thanks to community congregating around open table formats and metadata catalogs for storing data and enabling processing engines to access that data.
Now attention is shifting to another element of the stack that's been living quietly in the shadows: the semantic layer.
The semantic layer is an abstraction that sits between a company's data and the business metrics that it has chosen as its standard unit of measurement. It's a critical layer to ensure correctness.
For instance, while various departments in a company may have different opinions of what the best way to measure what 'revenue' means, the semantic layer defines what is the correct way to measure revenue for that company, thereby eliminating (or at least greatly reducing) the chance of getting bad analytic output.