As enterprises move from AI experimentation to production deployments, one challenge is becoming increasingly apparent: AI systems are only as reliable as the business context they operate in.
Snowflake is attempting to address that problem with Horizon Context, a new set of semantic and metadata-management capabilities, currently in preview, that it unveiled Tuesday at its annual Snowflake Summit conference.
Artin Avanes, head of core data platform at Snowflake, said that the offering, launched as part of Horizon Catalog, the company’s existing data discovery, management and governance suite, collects metadata from across an enterprise’s data estate, enriches it with business definitions, relationships, lineage, and governance information, and makes that context available across AI and analytics systems.
These capabilities, according to Avanes, build on Snowflake’s acquisition last year of Select Star, a metadata management startup known for its integrations with database systems such as PostgreSQL and MySQL, business intelligence tools like Tableau and Power BI, and data pipeline/orchestration tools such as dbt and Airflow.
Reducing operational complexity of agentic workflows
