iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 16/10/2026

A query can be fully authorized and still wrong. Join orders to order lines, sum an order-level amount, and you've counted it once per line. No error. Just a bigger number, delivered with confidence. Permission is one check. Correctness is another.

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 14/10/2026

An agent asks the semantic layer for revenue. Generating the SQL is the easy part. Is it the approved definition? Tested? Which sources fed it? Who changed it, and was that reviewed? Which version is live? Those aren't query problems. They're governance problems.

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 14/10/2026

My friend Dan reflecting on the future of software build/buy said the following and I’ve been thinking about it all day... “It's worth remembering that we were all supposed to have a 3D printer at home by now (which I do), making what we need instead of buying it (which it does not).”

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 12/10/2026

Interesting post from the team over at Columnar looking at fifty years of database technology with a really fun interactive timeline. It’s easy to get nerd sniped on this one, I know I did! #databs

columnar.tech

Fifty years of the data stack

An interactive history of the access, compute, and storage layers from 1976 to 2026

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 12/10/2026

The semantic layer is the waterline, not the iceberg. Above it: agents, dashboards, APIs. Below it: modeling, testing, lineage, review, deployment, audit. Most of the conversation is above the surface. Most of the risk is below. coginiti.co/blog/semanti...

coginiti.co

The Semantic Layer Is Only the Tip of the Iceberg

Why the work below the semantic layer decides whether AI answers can be trusted.

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Reposted by Matthew Mullins

Brett Karlan @oldjerryfodor.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

"I ran this piece of writing through an AI detector" oh cool I had a psychic tell me whether this was written by AI. We both have the same level of evidence now

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 30/09/2026

I’ll never cease to be amazed how some dudes can make a data platform their entire personality.

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Reposted by Matthew Mullins

All Things Open @allthingsopen.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Matthew Mullins (@mmullins.coginiti.co), CTO for @coginiti.co, joins us at #AllThingsOpen to present "Beyond the Table: Data Strategy and Governance in the Age of Apache Iceberg"! 2026.allthingsopen.org/sessions/bey...

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 27/09/2026

Next Wednesday I’m talking with @jtalisman.bsky.social, author of The Ontology Pipeline, about the distinction between data management and knowledge management. We’ll talk ontologies, context, knowledge infrastructure, and what AI systems are still missing. 9/30 at 2:30 PM ET

riverside.com

Data Is Not Knowledge

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 27/09/2026

Hand grinding coffee beans in the dark and didn't notice I was missing the base to capture the grind. So off to that kind of day...

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 27/09/2026

Pretty much how I was taught to engage in philosophical disagreements.

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 27/09/2026

Purview might be redundant. There isn’t any technical reason why an ontology couldn’t answer all the Purview examples like “Where is this data?, Who owns it?, How sensitive is it? and Where did it come from?” For prior art, data.world was a catalog implemented on KG.

data.world

The Data Catalog Platform

Discover data and metadata in seconds and develop data products and analytics that drive your business.

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 23/09/2026

BigDataLDN off to a banger start! Standing room only for my talk on the evolution of semantic layers and why they matter for context, governance, and costs in the age of agents! #bigdataldn

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 17/09/2026

Have you tried Stanley's How Fascism Works? As a philosopher of language he's linguistics adjacent.

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 16/09/2026

Telling a real semantic layer from a rebranded metrics catalogue, in 3 questions: 1. Can anything other than your BI tool read it? 2. Is policy enforced here or only documented here? 3. Does it survive a question nobody anticipated? #BigDataLDN #SemanticLayer

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 15/09/2026

The CDC should be concerned that we're seeing an outbreak of Frontier Spongiform Anthropomorphism.

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 15/09/2026

I'm concerned about the rampant Chronic Intent Attribution Syndrome (CIAS) — the tendency to interpret a model’s output as evidence of private motives, elaborate plans, and a burning desire to fool the evaluation team — running amok in AI labs.

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 14/09/2026

"Can't we just tell the agent what it's allowed to see?" You can. It'll mostly kinda work, and "mostly" is doing a lot of work there. Prompt policy is a request. Semantic layer policy is a boundary. #BigDataLDN #DataGovernance

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 09/09/2026

An agent's confidence is not correlated with its correctness. When an analyst doesn't know how you define revenue, they ask, and the question is visible. When an agent doesn't know, it picks, and the picking is invisible. #BigDataLDN #AIAgents

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Reposted by Matthew Mullins

coginiti.co @coginiti.co · 09/09/2026

Agents stopped failing at SQL. For the strongest model tested, 60%+ of remaining failures were semantic: wrong metric, wrong source, wrong join key. New research on what survives as models absorb the stack.

coginiti.co

Better Models Make Semantic Context Matter More | Coginiti Blog

A Berkeley/Stanford paper shows better models absorb agent scaffolding while semantic failures dominate. Why persistent, governed semantic context becomes the durable engineering problem.

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 07/09/2026

Kinda disappointed this wasn’t a hacked together chainsaw and ladder combo

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 01/09/2026

Wendell Berry is dead and I don’t feel so good myself. Peace of the Wild Things is the poem I’ve returned to most in life as a general comfort.

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 01/09/2026

Excited for the release of Coginiti 26.8. A highlight: Semantic Lineage, helping teams understand not just where data comes from, but how business meaning connects across entities, metrics, and transformations. Another step toward governed, semantic, AI-ready analytics. coginiti.co/blog/coginit...

coginiti.co

Coginiti 26.8 Release Notes | Coginiti Blog

Coginiti 26.8 deepens semantic modeling with a lineage graph, autocomplete and linting in the SMDL editor, and data quality testing for the Semantic Layer. It also adds synonyms,…

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 26/08/2026

Wrote up some thoughts on what the AWS acquisition of DuckLabs means for users and builders. (I think it's mostly good news). Congrats to Hannes, Mark, and the whole team at DuckLabs

fieldnotesondata.substack.com

What Changes When AWS Owns DuckLabs

AWS announced today that it has signed an agreement to acquire DuckLabs, the company behind DuckDB.

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Reposted by Matthew Mullins

Michael Bench-Dracula @mikebenchcapon.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

1 The world is all that is the case 1.1 The world is made up of facts, not things 1.11 Facts don't care about your feelings 1.111 😢

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 21/08/2026

We're moving data quality up stream to the semantic layer. Why? Because your tables can pass every data quality test and your business metrics can still be wrong. CoginitiScript tests now work with Semantic SQL, making it possible to test metrics as the business actually consumes them. #databs

coginiti.co

Testing Meaning, Not Just Rows: Data Quality at the Semantic Layer | Coginiti Blog

Row-level tests validate ingredients, not recipes. How CoginitiScript and Semantic SQL bring assertion-based testing to metrics, dimensions, and relationships.

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 20/08/2026

On Aug. 14, USFWS said no further action was planned for now while it reviewed the comments. That’s why today’s Cramer story matters: after the waterfowl community apparently stopped a rollback, Cramer is using holds on Trump nominees to pressure the administration to reverse course.

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 20/08/2026

In July, the Trump administration opened a 14-day review of the rule. Conservation groups feared it was the opening move toward weaker setbacks. The response was enormous: more than 219,000 comments, including a Ducks Unlimited petition with more than 100,000 signatures.

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 20/08/2026

The present dispute is about drain tile near those protected wetlands. In 2024 USFWS formalized a site-specific setback process based on hydrology, soils, topography, tile depth and other factors, plus a safe harbor for landowners who follow the agency’s approved plan.

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 20/08/2026

This success matters because huge portions of the original landscape are already gone or degraded. DU estimates that in some parts of the PPR, 50–90% of pothole wetlands have been lost or severely degraded. The remaining intact complexes do disproportionate work.

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 20/08/2026

Ducks Unlimited is central to this story. DU was founded in 1937 amid collapsing waterfowl populations, and its first major work focused on prairie breeding habitat. The PPR remains its highest-priority landscape, and DU has spent decades partnering with USFWS and landowners on easements.

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 20/08/2026

More than 1.7 million acres are now under permanent federal wetland easements, primarily in the Prairie Pothole Region. Much of that protection was paid for by hunters through Duck Stamps. This is one of the greatest user-funded conservation programs in American history.

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 20/08/2026

The basic tool of the program is a voluntary, permanent easement. A willing landowner takes a one-time payment; the land stays private and can still be farmed, grazed or hayed. The protected wetland just cannot be drained, filled, leveled or burned.

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 20/08/2026

We've spent generations protecting these places. Federal Duck Stamp money has funded waterfowl habitat since the 1930s. A tax hunters voted on themselves! In 1958 Congress created the Small Wetlands Acquisition Program specifically to conserve prairie potholes and other breeding habitat.

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 20/08/2026

These are small bodies of water. Some of the most productive habitat is made of shallow seasonal wetlands embedded in working farmland. You don’t have to bulldoze or ditch a pothole to destroy it. Put a subsurface drain tile too close and you can starve it of water.

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 20/08/2026

This region supports more than half of North America’s breeding ducks in most years; in wet years, its share of continental duck production can be as high as 70%. Without it we lose mallards, pintails, teal, gadwall, shovelers, canvasbacks and redheads which all depend heavily on it.

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 20/08/2026

The Prairie Pothole Region is a vast belt of glacial wetlands across the Dakotas, Minnesota, Iowa, Montana and the Canadian prairies. Millions of shallow depressions left by the last ice age fill seasonally with water. They may look tiny, but ecologically they are enormous.

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 20/08/2026

Some people are reading this article about Sen. Kevin Cramer and Trump nominees as a sign of GOP pushback on Trump. Nope, the real subject is a bipartisan issue about the future of North America’s “Duck Factory” which is a huge conservation story that's barely registered here on bluesky.

thehill.com

GOP senator places hold on Trump nominees over wetlands policy

Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer (N.D.) is placing a hold on all future Trump nominees over the administration’s approach to wetlands. In a statement shared with The Hill, Cramer expressed disapp…

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 20/08/2026

Great evening out with the Wake Dems. @ross.house.gov was on fire with her remarks and generously took town hall questions. Lot of good energy in the room going into the midterms.

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 19/08/2026

Excited to be headed to #BigDataLDN next month and talking about semantic layer goodness. Come for the talk and swing by the Coginiti booth to chat all things data, semantics, and AI. Tickets are free, so no reason not to attend if you're in the London area. www.bigdataldn.com/en-gb/regist...

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 17/08/2026

A career in data takes more than learning the right tools. I’m talking with Aaron Wilkerson of Carhartt next Tuesday about what actually gets you to the next level: technical skills, business impact, leadership, career choices, and what AI changes. riverside.com/webinar/regi...

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 13/08/2026

Had the chance to meet @paulbarringer.com running to be North Carolina's 13th district representative. He's an a real Eagle Scout, AT trail hiker, grew up and lives on a farm, and most importantly understands the needs of North Carolina voters. Working for change in the midterm elections!

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Matthew Mullins @mmullins.coginiti.co · 05/08/2026

Kicking the Palantir habit seems like a good start. It's amazing to see someone complain about finding a good alternative. I can think of a half dozen off the top of my head that aren't actively trying to be evil. We don't ship spark in a box, but would consider it. 😂 #databs

politico.eu

Europe wants to kick its Palantir habit

The U.S.-based data crunching firm is deeply embedded in the most sensitive European workflows, from policing to intelligence to health care. Finding alternatives won’t be easy.

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