(Adapted from an article published on jgp.ai on August 9th, 2023.)

AIDA (Artificial Intelligence, Data, and Analytics) User Group has released version 2.2 of the Open Data Contract Standard (ODCS). Let’s investigate this evolution contract and opportunities to discuss, face to face, the standard and general data contracts.

There was a bit of confusion about the need to be a member of the AIDA User Group to contribute to the Open Data Contract Standard, so let us clarify: everything happens on GitHub, all the links are at the bottom of this article.

Quick reminder

The data contract proposes an agreement between data producers and consumers around eight sections. Data product owners own the contract. The former data contract template (discussed in early May) is evolving based on needs & discussions with the community.

Data Contract stakeholders, sections, and usage.

Updated version

Version 2.2 of the Open Data Contract Standard (ODCS) was released on July 27th, 2023. It’s a minor evolution from the previous version, v2.1.1. You can find the updated version at GitHub.com/AIDAUserGroup/open-data-contract-standard.

Let’s go through the main changes.

Authoritative definitions

Authoritative definitions are the methodology to link your data contracts to various external systems, creating authoritative links that you can use for data governance.

Authoritative definitions were allowed at the column level; now, they are also available at the table level in the contract.

In the following example, you can see that the table tbl has two definitions. The first one is a business definition, which has a link to the data.gov website. The second is a video tutorial pointing to YouTube. Of course, those links could be pointing to internal systems in an enterprise setting.

As a reminder, authoritative definitions were allowed at the column level to indicate the definition of transformations or column-level business transformation.

The next version, currently in development, will normalize the types of authoritative definitions.

Hosting & governance

As a non-profit organization, AIDA User Group is a perfect vehicle for hosting and developing the data contract standard. The data contract template has been renamed Open Data Contract Standard as part of this fork.

Examples

Many examples have been added to a dedicated folder. Check them out!

Calling for contributions

The Open Data Contract Standard is a community effort. You can start a discussion or report issues. Of course, as with any other Open Source project, feel free to do pull requests as you see typos, errors, or additional information. Examples are also welcome.

Featured photo from Pexels.com

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