Open Data Contract Standard (ODCS)
Welcome!
Thanks for your interest and for taking the time to come here! ❤️
Executive summary
This standard describes a structure for a data contract. Its current version is v3.0.2. It is available for you as an Apache 2.0 license. Contributions are welcome!
Discover the open standard
A reader-friendly version of the standard can be found on its dedicated site.
Discover the Open Data Contract Standard. This file contains some explanations and several examples. More examples can be found here.
What is a Data Contract?
The basics of a data contract
A data contract defines the agreement between a data producer and consumers. A data contract contains several sections:
- Fundamentals.
- Schema.
- Data quality.
- Support & communication channels
- Pricing
- Team
- Roles
- Service-level agreement (SLA).
- Infrastructures & servers
- Custom properties.
Figure 1: illustration of a data contract, its principal contributors, sections, and usage.
JSON Schema
JSON Schema for ODCS can be found here. You can import this schema into your IDE for validation of your YAML files. Links below show how you can import the schema:
Articles and Other Resources
Check out the resources page.
Contributing to the project
Check out the CONTRIBUTING page.
More
Citation
If you need to cite this standard, you can use the following BibTeX entry:
@manual{ODCS2025,
title = {Open Data Contract Standard (ODCS)},
author = {{Bitol}},
organization = {LF AI \& Data Foundation},
year = {2025},
url = {https://bitol-io.github.io/open-data-contract-standard}
}
Mime/Media Type
The official media (fka mime) type is: