Open semantic interchange: what it means for governance teams

TL;DR: Open Semantic Interchange and governed semantic layers aim to make data definitions, lineage, and access controls consistent across Snowflake and Collibra workflows, which matters as unstructured data and AI models depend on trusted context, according to Collibra. The deeper shift is that governance now has to travel with the data and the semantics, not sit beside them.

NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Collibra: Accelerating data delivery using OSI with Snowflake and Collibra

By the numbers:

• Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts.
• 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface.
• 79% of organisations have experienced secrets leaks, with 77% of these incidents resulting in tangible damage.

Questions worth separating out

Q: How should governance teams manage semantic consistency across data platforms and AI tools?

A: Governance teams should treat semantic consistency as a control objective, not a documentation exercise.

Q: Why do data governance and IAM teams need to work together on semantic layers?

A: Because access control and meaning control now overlap.

Q: How can organisations tell whether policy translation into warehouse controls is working?

A: Look for consistency between policy intent, platform enforcement, and actual user experience.

Practitioner guidance

• Inventory semantic dependencies across key data products Map the metrics, dimensions, and governed definitions that feed executive dashboards, AI models, and operational reports.
• Translate policy language into enforceable warehouse controls Validate that plain-language access rules are represented in row access policies, dynamic masking, and any downstream enforcement logic.
• Treat semantic lineage as part of assurance evidence Include metric provenance, source facts, and transformation logic in governance reviews so audit teams can verify that business meaning has not drifted across tools.

What's in the full article

Collibra's full blog post covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:

• How the OSI model is represented in Snowflake and Collibra workflows for implementation teams
• Examples of how semantic views, row access policies, and masking logic are chained together
• The specific accelerator concepts Collibra says can generate OSI and Snowflake Semantic View documents
• The full narrative Collibra uses to explain how AI models consume governed context in practice

👉 Read Collibra's analysis of open semantic interchange and data governance →

Open semantic interchange: what it means for governance teams?

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