What is OpenDome?

OpenDome is an open-core data platform for teams that need to put their structured and unstructured data behind a single, governed, queryable interface — without handing it to a third party.

You run a cell: a self-contained, per-tenant Kubernetes namespace that holds your lakehouse (Iceberg + Lance), your pipelines, and the consumption engine. Everything that reads data goes through one surface — the OpenDome Semantic Layer (OSL).

The one rule: OSL is the sole consumption layer

Structured data, unstructured data, metrics, entities and natural language are consumed exclusively through OSL. Trino, Lance and dbt are internal engines: they never expose a public endpoint. No consumer talks to Trino directly.

Why this matters

If a consumer can reach the data without going through OSL, that’s an architecture bug — it bypasses the policy enforcement point and the audit chain. One door means one place to govern, one place to audit, one place to evolve the model.

Two planes, one spec

OSL describes a semantic model that spans two physical substrates with a single declarative YAML language:

Structured plane

Iceberg tables via Trino. Entities, metrics, dimensions, data contracts. Here OSL is a superset of dbt MetricFlow — any valid MetricFlow project is valid OSL.

Unstructured plane

Lance collections via LanceDB. Chunk schema, embeddings, hybrid retrieval (vector + BM25 + metadata filters), row-level ACL. This is the OSL-only extension.

The bridge between them is the JointEntity: a logical object (Customer, Policy, Order) whose primary key comes from a structured model and which exposes attributes drawn from both planes. One call, one policy decision, one audit trail. See Concepts for the full model.

What you get out of the box (OSS)

The Apache-2.0 distribution is everything needed to run and consume a cell on your own infrastructure:

• The cell data plane — Helm charts for a standalone, self-contained tenant.
• The OSL engine (tenant-semantic-api) serving the 13 /osl/* endpoints.
• Connectors (Singer/Meltano taps: Postgres, MySQL, Salesforce, custom).
• The embedder and Lance-backed retrieval.
• Policy evaluation (SQL allowlist, row filters, projection) — fail-closed.
• The OSL specification, JSON Schemas and a worked example.

OSS vs EnterpriseWhat's Apache-2.0 today, and what the managed/Enterprise tier adds — the console, control-plane, vertical packs, and compliance.

Who this is for

• Adopters (a customer data team) — model your domain in OSL, connect sources, serve governed metrics and retrieval. Start with Concepts then the Quickstart.
• Agent authors — build agents against OSL’s MCP tools and REST. See the API reference.
• Spec implementers — build an OSL-conformant engine. See Spec & governance.

Next step

Quickstart (self-hosted)Bring up a cell on kind/Kubernetes with no control-plane, mint a token, and make your first governed call.