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Glossary

Terms used in ODCS documents and this reference implementation.

Document metadata

Term Definition
Data contract A machine-readable ODCS document describing a dataset and its guarantees
version Your contract's revision identifier (e.g. 1.0.0); not the ODCS spec version
apiVersion ODCS specification release (e.g. v3.1.0); gates which spec rules apply
kind Document type; must be DataContract for this tool
id Stable unique identifier for the contract
status Lifecycle state (draft, active, deprecated, etc.)

Schema and quality

Term Definition
schema[] List of logical data objects (tables, events, files) in the contract
properties[] Columns or fields within a schema object
logicalType Semantic type (string, object, array, …)
quality[] Data quality rules nested under a schema object or property
Library metric Built-in quality metric: nullValues, missingValues, invalidValues, duplicateValues, rowCount
customProperties Extension mechanism for vendor- or team-specific metadata

Ownership and operations

Term Definition
team Ownership and contact information (v3.1.0 object form)
roles[] Access roles defined on the contract or server
slaProperties[] Service level agreement definitions
servers[] Physical or logical data source definitions (Snowflake, Kafka, Postgres, …)
relationships[] Foreign-key-style links between schema objects

This implementation

Term Definition
odcs Rust crate and CLI for parsing and validating ODCS documents
pyodcs Python package wrapping the same Rust core
Diagnostic Structured error record with stable odcs:* code, message, and optional object_ref
object_ref Path to the affected field (e.g. schema[0].properties[0].name)
Canonical Object Model Typed Rust DataContract struct graph deserialized from YAML/JSON
Pinned JSON Schema Bundled ODCS v3.1.0 schema at schema/odcs-v3.1.0.json used in default validation

Ecosystem

Term Definition
ODCS Open Data Contract Standard — what data is
DTCS Data Transformation Contract Standard — how data changes
DPCS Data Pipeline Contract Standard — how transformations compose

See Relationship to DTCS.