Snowflake has introduced Business Ontology to connect business terms with their owners, scope and calculations. Teams can approve different definitions for different parts of a company, while agents draw on the resulting shared meaning. Public previews are still forthcoming, and business specialists and engineers retain separate roles in defining and implementing the terms.
Enterprise data company Snowflake introduced Business Ontology on November 3 to give software agents access to approved business meanings. A term such as net revenue can be linked to its definition, responsible owner, applicable business area and underlying calculation. The product sits in Horizon Context, the company’s business-context layer within its Horizon Catalog data-governance system.[1], [2]
Business specialists set the meaning, while engineers map it to data and the views that perform calculations. Different brands or regions can retain separately approved meanings for the same term. Permissions control who creates, changes or approves a definition. Snowflake says an approved meaning takes priority when it conflicts with a suggestion inferred by artificial intelligence from patterns of use.[1]
Schemas, query histories and dashboard definitions can provide starting material for proposed definitions. People review imported glossaries and suggestions before approval. Context suggestions, approved meaning and metric calculations have distinct roles in the system; ownership of calculation logic stays with the relevant view’s maintainers. Snowflake describes public previews of Business Ontology and its context-suggestion tool Cortex Sense as forthcoming.[1]
