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Tags

Tags are lightweight, free-form classification labels that can be attached to many elements of a data contract. The structure is shared across the Bitol standards and follows the same shape everywhere it appears.

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What tags are for

Tags are intended for categorization — making elements easier to find, filter, group, and route through tooling. Common uses include:

  • Domain or topic: finance, marketing, iot
  • Sensitivity / compliance: pii, phi, gdpr, pci, sensitive
  • Lifecycle: experimental, deprecated, terminal
  • Audience: internal, external, partner
  • Operational hint: hot, cold, archive

Tags are deliberately not a controlled vocabulary in ODCS: your organisation defines what each tag means. For richer, governed metadata, prefer authoritative definitions or custom properties.

Structure

A tags value is always an array of strings. Empty arrays are allowed; duplicate strings within the same array should be avoided.

tags: ['finance', 'sensitive']

The same structure applies wherever tags is permitted.

Where tags can appear

tags is available in the following places:

Location Notes
Top-level (data contract) Tags applied to the contract as a whole. See Fundamentals.
Schema element (object) Tags applied to a table/topic/file. See Schema.
Schema element (property) Tags applied to an individual column/field. See Schema.
Enum value Tags applied to a specific enumeration entry (e.g., terminal, active). See Enumerations.
Data quality check Tags applied to a quality rule. See Data Quality.
Team Tags applied to the team block. See Team.
Team member Tags applied to an individual team member. See Team.

Recommendations

  • Lowercase, snake_case or single words. Mixed casing makes filtering brittle.
  • Be consistent. A tag pii in one contract and PII in another defeats the purpose. Document your tag taxonomy organisation-wide.
  • Prefer specific over generic. customer_pii is more useful than sensitive once you have many contracts.
  • Avoid encoding hierarchy in tag strings. finance/regulatory is harder for tooling than two separate tags finance, regulatory.
  • Keep tags small in number. A handful per element is plenty; long tag lists become noise.

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