"Semantic-free" is the future of Business Intelligence

A semantic layer is a business-friendly representation of data, allowing for explanation of complex business logic in simpler terms. In Business Intelligence (BI), it has been called the metadata layer, semantic model, business view, or BI model. When the semantic layer was first introduced to BI tools 30 years ago, it defined table joins, metric aggregation, user-friendly names and more, allowing BI end-users to simply drag-and-drop fields like Product Name and Sales onto a report. Yes, "no-code" BI has been around for at least 30 years. This allowed early data teams to start thinking more strategically about where to put business logic, but also opened up a lot of complex issues.