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What is IQ (preview)?

IQ (preview) is a workload for unifying data sitting across OneLake (including lakehouses, eventhouses, and semantic models) and organizing it according to the language of your business. The data is then exposed to analytics, AI agents, and applications with consistent semantic meaning and context.

Important

This feature is in preview.

Why use IQ (preview)?

IQ (preview) enables the following benefits:

  • Consistency across tools: A single definition of a concept (like Customer, Material, or Asset) drives how Power BI, notebooks, and agents interpret data.
  • Faster onboarding: New dashboards or AI experiences don't need to rediscover business meaning, as business concepts only need to be declared once.
  • Governance and trust: Clear semantics reduce duplication and semantic drift, while constraints improve data quality.
  • Cross domain reasoning: Graph links let you traverse relationships (like Order > Shipment > Temperature Sensor > Cold Chain Breach) to explain outcomes.
  • AI readiness: Ontologies provide structured grounding for copilots and agents, so answers reflect your enterprise language.

Where IQ (preview) fits in Fabric

Here's how IQ (preview) implements key Fabric capabilities:

  • Ingest and store: Builds on data from lakehouse tables, eventhouse streams, and existing semantic models.
  • Model and represent semantics: The ontology (preview) item offers modeling capabilities by defining entity types, properties on entity types, and relationship types. It binds these features to data sources, and automatically builds a navigable graph.
  • Analyze and visualize: The ontology (preview) item integrates with Graph in Microsoft Fabric to provide a visual graph and query experience based on your business concepts. You can also build Power BI models grounded in your ontology, or use the ontology to inform power domain aware agents.
  • Operate and govern: You can version, validate, and govern your ontology definitions. You can also monitor ontology health through Fabric monitoring tools.

Items in IQ (preview)

IQ (preview) contains the following items:

  • Ontology (preview): Ontology (preview) is an item for the enterprise vocabulary and semantic layer that unifies meaning across domains and OneLake sources. It defines entity types, relationships, properties, and rules and constraints, and binds them to real data so that downstream tools share the same language.
  • Fabric data agent (preview): Fabric data agent (preview) allows you to build your own conversational Q&A systems using generative AI.
  • Graph in Microsoft Fabric (preview): Graph in Microsoft Fabric (preview) offers native graph storage and compute for nodes, edges, and traversals over connected data. It's good for path finding, dependency analysis, and graph algorithms.
  • Operations agent (preview): Operations agent (preview) lets you create an AI agent to monitor real-time data and recommend business actions.
  • Power BI semantic model: A semantic model is a curated analytics model that's optimized for reporting and interactive analysis with measures, scorecard hierarchies, and relationships for visuals and DAX.

Choose the right item

This section contains guidance for choosing the right tools for your scenario from the modeling options in Fabric. The following table includes modeling-related items from IQ and Real-Time Intelligence.

Item When to use
Ontology (preview) in IQ Use when you need cross-domain consistency, governance, and AI/agent grounding, and you want to reason across processes.
Graph in Microsoft Fabric (preview) Use when relationship-heavy questions (like impact chains, communities, and shortest paths) dominate your decision making, and you need graph-native performance.
Power BI semantic model Use when business users need trusted KPIs and fast visuals with dimensional modeling, calculations, and governed datasets for self-service BI.
Digital twin builder (preview) in Real-Time Intelligence Use when you need operational context, stateful twins, scenario analysis, or what-if simulation tied to real assets and signals.

Item relationships

This section describes how items work together or relate to one another.

  • Ontology (preview) and semantic model: Define enterprise concepts (like Customer, Shipment, and Breach) one time, and generate or align Power BI models so that KPIs remain consistent across reports.
  • Ontology (preview) and Graph in Microsoft Fabric: Ontology declares which things connect and why. Graph in Microsoft Fabric stores and computes traversals (like "Find shipments exposed to risky routes and related breaches").
  • Ontology (preview) and digital twin builder: Ontology provides reusable types (like Asset, Sensor, and Thresholds). Digital twin builder instantiates specific twins and runs scenarios using those types.
  • All items: Ontology defines the language for your business. Digital twin builder makes it operational for assets. Graph in Microsoft Fabric powers dependency/impact analysis, and semantic models present trusted KPIs.

Next steps

Learn about building an ontology in What is ontology (preview)?

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