Semantic layer

A semantic layer is a business representation of corporate data that helps end users access data autonomously using common business terms managed through business semantics management. A semantic layer maps complex data into familiar business terms such as product, customer, or revenue to offer a unified, consolidated view of data across the organization.

The term is also used in a related, but distinct sense to describe the architecture and framework used to describe an organization's knowledge assets, including unstructured and structured data in a consistent, machine and human readable representation. These semantic layers are built using semantic standards such as RDF, SKOS, and OWL. This usage has grown alongside interest in knowledge graphs and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) as infrastructure for enterprise artificial intelligence.