Open standards for modern data engineering, starting with Data Contracts

Bitol represents a constant iterative process that symbolizes evolution. Our mission is to foster a set of standards to define data contracts, data products, and more in order to tackle multiple data engineering challenges, such as data normalization, ensuring the relevance of documentation, establishing service-level expectations, simplifying data and tool integration, and promoting a data product-oriented approach.

Bitol is a Linux Foundation AI & Data Incubation project licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. As of now, it defines an open standard for data contracts called Open Data Contract Standard.

A data contract is an agreement between a data producer and its consumers. It not only describes the data but also its expected behavior by advertising the data quality rules the data needs to obey, as well as service levels, stakeholders, roles, and pricing. Data contracts should follow an open and extensible standard like the Open Data Contract Standard (ODCS), adopted by many organizations. ODCS leverages YAML and can, therefore, easily be versioned and governed. As a consequence, a data contract is enforceable and actionable by tools and services that follow the standard.