Contracts

ODCS

Open Data Contract Standard

Adopt Foundation BITOL / Linux Foundation Since 2023 🏅 Entropy Data pick

Judgement: Adopt

Winning data-contract spec; YAML, multi-vendor.

YAML-based open standard for defining data contracts: schema, data quality, SLAs, terms of use, team ownership, servers. Think of it as OpenAPI, but for data.

Originated as PayPal's internal Data Contract Template (donated as ODCS 2.x). Starting with v3.0 the standard was generalised for any enterprise.

Example

A data contract: who owns the data, where it physically lives, and what the schema promises.

apiVersion: v3.1.0
kind: DataContract
id: 53581432-6c55-4ba2-a65f-72344a91553a
domain: seller
dataProduct: my quantum
version: 1.1.0
status: active
description:
  purpose: Views built on top of the seller tables.
servers:
  - server: my-postgres
    type: postgres
    host: localhost
    port: 5432
    database: pypl-edw
    schema: pp_access_views
schema:
  - name: tbl
    physicalType: table
    properties:
      - name: rcvr_id
        logicalType: string
        physicalType: varchar(18)
        primaryKey: true

At a glance

Category
Contracts
Governance
BITOL / Linux Foundation
Status
v3.1 stable; v3.2 in progress
First released
2023

Links

Related standards

Other standards in Contracts.

See ODCS in context

Open the interactive Data Landscape to compare ODCS against every other open standard, or grab the raw JSON. Spotted something wrong? Open an issue.