Business Ontology: Governed Context for AI
Snowflake, Tuesday, November 3rd, 2026
Snowflake announces Business Ontology, a governed way to define and approve business terms and metrics so AI agents and people share definitions.
Snowflake announced Business Ontology, coming soon in public preview as part of Snowflake Horizon Context in Horizon Catalog.
It lets teams define, own and approve shared business terms, entities, relationships and metrics and connect them to the data and models that implement them, while preserving differences between domains such as sales and finance.
Horizon Context also gathers metadata from tools like Tableau, Power BI, dbt and PostgreSQL and provides cross-platform lineage.
Snowflake describes three context layers: Cortex Sense to infer context automatically, Business Ontology to govern meaning, and Semantic Views to compute metrics consistently.