Business Ontology: Governed Context for AI

Today we’re announcing Business Ontology (public preview soon), a governed way for teams to define, own and approve shared business terms, entities, relationships and metrics and to connect them to the data and models that implement them. Part of Snowflake Horizon Context, the governed context layer in Horizon Catalog, Business Ontology gives people and AI agents the same approved definitions, so agents can interpret enterprise data the way the business does. Teams can reuse that knowledge across agents and applications without redefining it for each tool, while preserving differences across domains such as sales, finance and marketing. For example, an agent answering a revenue question needs to know how finance defines "revenue" and how it relates to orders and customers. That knowledge usually lives across BI models, dbt projects and the experience of long-tenured employees, and teams often rebuild it for each new agent. If an agent gets it wrong, people make decisions based on the wrong number and lose trust in AI answers. Business Ontology gives teams one official place to record that knowledge. Figure 1: Snowflake Business Ontology connects business concepts such as customers, orders and net revenue to the tables, semantic views and services that implement them,…