I believe the author missed another approach of the semantic layer. That is the one used by Power BI Semantic model or, and perhaps, the most interesting one Malloy. In these tools, the semantic layer is a thin layer that only define the following: - metric definition (mostly as aggregation function) - dimensions of analysis (product category, country, etc.)

This blog makes a much better argument than I would at presenting why Malloy is a really interesting and welcome innovation in Data Analytics space : https://carlineng.com/?postid=malloy-intro#blog