Building the Brain of the Agentic Lakehouse: Designing an Open Catalog Architecture

This article details the architectural components of an open catalog designed for AI agent access within an agentic lakehouse. It emphasizes that a catalog must provide table discovery, business context, semantic relationships, access policies, and lineage for reliable AI querying. It covers Apache Polaris as an open-standard Iceberg REST catalog implementation and Dremio's Open Catalog extension with federation and governance features. The post contrasts open vs. proprietary catalog designs and discusses structuring catalogs for agent use, making it relevant to IT/technology professionals working on data platforms, AI integrations, and modern data architectures.