Lineage

OpenLineage

Adopt Foundation Linux Foundation Since 2020

Judgement: Adopt

The lineage-emission standard, with column-level support.

Open standard for collecting lineage metadata from data pipelines, including column-level lineage. Producers emit OpenLineage events; consumers (Marquez, catalogs, custom UIs) ingest them.

For runtime lineage details — how the pipeline actually works — OpenLineage traces are the answer, not the data contract. Use both: contracts for design, OpenLineage for execution.

Example

A run event: which job ran, which datasets went in, which came out. Emitted by the pipeline, not scraped after the fact.

{
  "eventType": "COMPLETE",
  "eventTime": "2026-01-14T10:15:30.000Z",
  "producer": "https://github.com/OpenLineage/OpenLineage/tree/1.0.0/integration/spark",
  "run": { "runId": "d46e465b-d358-4d32-83d4-df660ff614dd" },
  "job": { "namespace": "spark", "name": "orders_by_city" },
  "inputs":  [{ "namespace": "postgres://db:5432", "name": "public.orders" }],
  "outputs": [{ "namespace": "s3://warehouse",     "name": "marts.orders_by_city" }]
}

At a glance

Category
Lineage
Governance
Linux Foundation
Status
Stable; growing integration list
First released
2020

Links

Related standards

Other standards in Lineage.

See OpenLineage in context

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