Rename Field to Dimension

[cpimhoff]

“Field” means a different thing in lots of different technical domains and is prone to conflation at times. Professionals in many domains use “field” similarly to “property”, which carries no semantic meaning other than “some value on a thing”. As such, we should use a more specific term for something this core.

Most semantic layers have chosen “dimension” as the name for this concept (Snowflake, Cube, MetricFlow, Malloy, Hashboard, Hex, LookML). I would suggest OSI choose dimensions: over fields:.

I see in the OSI specification that a Field has a dimension property on it, and I think that’s very peculiar. The dimension object currently encodes very little information, only is_time, and so I don’t see why this either A) can’t be moved to the top level of the field, or B) wrapped in a clearer type, such as type_information: { is_time } (or follow this suggestion).