2026-09-30 AI and semantic layers

This month, returning presenter Will Martin will be joining us to tell us about
From Open Storage to Open Meaning: How Apache Ossie (Incubating) Completes the Open Data Lakehouse

Will writes:

The open data lakehouse has a solid data foundation thanks to Apache Iceberg and Apache Polaris: an open table format and catalog any query engine can share without lock-in. But openness in storage doesn't mean openness in meaning. Business context, like “revenue” and “active customer”, tends to sit in downstream systems, like notebooks and BI tools. These definitions tend to not agree and they don’t travel well between systems. That is, until Apache Ossie (Incubating), the newly Apache-incubated open spec for semantic layers and ontologies, backed by Snowflake, Dremio, Databricks, dbt Labs, and Salesforce.

This talk will explain the current open data lakehouse stack and introduce Apache Ossie (Incubating). We’ll discuss how open source projects provide vendor-neutral options without sacrificing performance, and why shared semantics is the next open standards fight in this age of agentic analytics.

Also, we've got a lightning talk lined up on Microsoft Fabric, straight from the trenches :)

The Fabric Tax

Mehmet Yolcu - BI Lead, Brighton & Hove City Council

What does Microsoft's so-called unified analytics platform actually cost data teams once the demo wraps and production kicks in? Mehmet's back at the Brighton Data Forum with a holistic look at Fabric after a year of real-world use. If you're weighing up Fabric, or already paying the tax, this is 15 minutes of field notes you won't get from the keynote.

Please be punctual, the event is hosted by our loyal hosts at Barclay's Eagle Labs in their Platf9rm offices, supported by Silicon Brighton and sponsored by Rittman Analytics.