A single place where business metrics are defined, so every tool and team reads the same numbers the same way.
Reviewed by Francisco Ferreira ·
A semantic layer is the agreed translation between raw tables and business language. Instead of each dashboard, notebook and team re-deriving 'revenue' from raw rows, the semantic layer defines it once, and everyone reads that one definition. It is the single source of truth for what a metric means.
Without it, you get the classic problem: three dashboards, three different revenue numbers, and a meeting spent arguing about which is right instead of what to do. The data isn't wrong — the definitions are inconsistent, and nobody owns the canonical one.
Tabkeel acts as a lightweight semantic layer you can run without a full data stack: define metrics in SQL, keep them in one catalog, and monitor them for both data and definition drift.