November Meetup

Please note the change of venue!

Welcome to our November 2026 meetup hosted by Enablis. Please see the directions provided on this page.

We are pleased to welcome Will Martin with "From Open Storage to Open Meaning: How Apache Ossie (Incubating) Completes the Open Data Lakehouse"

If you would like to volunteer as a speaker for our upcoming meetups, please reach out to us at [email protected].

Schedule

18:00--18:45h: Refreshments (Food served on first come first served basis)

18:45--18:50h: Welcome

18:50--20:00h: Will Martin, Data & AI Evangelist at Dremio,
From Open Storage to Open Meaning: How Apache Ossie (Incubating) Completes the Open Data Lakehouse

The open data lakehouse has a solid data foundation thanks to Apache Iceberg and Apache Polaris: an open table format and catalog that any query engine can share without lock-in. But openness in storage doesn't mean openness in meaning. Business context, like “revenue” and “active customer”, tends to sit in downstream systems, like notebooks and BI tools. These definitions tend not to agree, and they don’t travel well between systems. That is, until Apache Ossie (Incubating) — the newly Apache-incubated open spec for semantic layers and ontologies, backed by Snowflake, Dremio, Databricks, dbt Labs, and Salesforce.
This talk will explain the current open data lakehouse stack and introduce Apache Ossie (Incubating). We’ll discuss how open source projects provide vendor-neutral options without sacrificing performance, and why shared semantics is the next open standards fight in this age of agentic analytics.

Bio

Will Martin is Dremio’s Data & AI Evangelist. Starting out with statistical analysis in particle physics, his professional journey has spanned multiple industries, including banking, shipping logistics, entertainment, healthcare, defence, and customer 360. With experience as a data engineer, solutions architect, and software developer, he has spent 15+ years collaborating with companies and organisations across EMEA and APAC, including roles at CERN, Deloitte, and Tamr.

News and Announcements

Have a news item or announcement you'd like to make about upcoming data events or job opportunities in Leeds? Comment below or contact us directly ([email protected]) and we'll do our best to circulate this information at the end of the session.

Please contact the organisers if you would like to volunteer as a speaker for future events.