Six vendors build semantic layers for AI agents in one month; NVIDIA open-sources Auto Ontology

YvesMulkers · x · 2026-11-04

7wData's Yves Mulkers tracks six vendors — Microsoft, Dell, Oracle, SAP, Zoho, NVIDIA — all moving on the same idea within one month: a semantic/ontology layer that tells AI agents what data means (which column is revenue, which 'active customer' definition is approved) so agents write SQL against definitions instead of guessing from column names.

NVIDIA Auto Ontology (Oct 28, open source): reads metadata from Databricks, Snowflake, Postgres, DuckDB; proposes a starting ontology stored in Postgres; accessible via MCP/CLI/API; defaults to Nemotron but works with any OpenAI-compatible model. Claims 90% less ontology-building time (NVIDIA's own testing, no accuracy results yet). Approved by business experts.
Microsoft (Sep 28): ontology-drafting agent in Fabric IQ, approval process not described.
Dell (Oct 6): semantic layer + knowledge graph embedding NVIDIA's tool, three weeks before the open-source write-up.
Oracle (Oct 26): Business Semantic Layer due within 12 months, defined by your teams.
SAP (Oct 27–29): Ontology Manager on SAP Knowledge Graph, built by your teams.
Zoho (Oct 28): semantic and ontology layers in Zoho Analytics, approver unnamed.

Key concern: a wrong definition yields a confident wrong number, yet only NVIDIA says who signs off — half the six don't.

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Six vendors build semantic layers for AI agents in one month; NVIDIA open-sources Auto Ontology

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