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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 v3.1.0. 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.
• References.
• Data quality.
• Support & communication channels
• Pricing.
• Team.
• Roles.
• Service-level agreement (SLA).
• Infrastructures & servers.
• Custom & other 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:

• IntelliJ
• VS Code

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:

application/odcs+yaml;version=3.1.0