On behalf of the Bitol Technical Steering Committee (TSC), I am thrilled to announce the official release of the Open Data Contract Standard (ODCS) v3.1.0. This release represents a significant maturation of the standard, introducing powerful new capabilities that make data contracts more expressive, more executable, and more interoperable—all while maintaining complete backward compatibility with existing v3.0.x contracts.

ODCS v3.1.0 is now available

Evolution Without Disruption

ODCS v3.1.0 embodies a fundamental principle: standards should evolve to serve their communities without forcing disruptive rewrites. Every v3.0.x contract remains valid in v3.1.0. This release focuses on adding missing capabilities, refining patterns that needed improvement, and tightening validation to ensure consistency across implementations.

The message is clear: you can adopt v3.1.0 on your schedule, gaining access to new features when you need them, without emergency migrations or breaking changes.

ODCS v3.1.0 is a superset of previous versions.

What’s New: Ten Key Enhancements

1. Relationships Between Properties (RFC-0013)

Data doesn’t exist in isolation: it’s connected. ODCS v3.1.0 now lets you describe relationships between properties, even when the underlying system doesn’t enforce them. Whether you’re documenting foreign key relationships, parent-child hierarchies, or custom associations, contracts can now capture the semantic connections that matter.

This paves the way for automated validation, SQL DDL generation, ER-style diagrams, and better data understanding across teams and tools. Relationships bring your contracts closer to the real structure of your data.

2. Expanded Date and Time Support (RFC-0017)

Time is complex, and ODCS now reflects that. The new date, timestamp, and time logical types, along with timezone and format support, enable precise temporal data modeling that aligns with real-world databases and file formats.

Whether you’re working with ISO 8601 timestamps, legacy date formats, or time-only fields, ODCS v3.1.0 provides the expressive power to document it accurately and ensure tools can interpret it correctly.

3. Richer Metadata Through Extensions (RFC-0024)

Custom properties and authoritative definitions now support optional description fields, bringing them into alignment with the Open Data Product Standard (ODPS) and enabling richer, more context-rich metadata throughout your contracts.

This enhancement makes it easier to document the “why” behind custom extensions and authoritative definitions, improving clarity for both humans and machines.

customProperties:
  - id: data_proc_cluster_name
    property: dataprocClusterName
    value: [ cluster name ]
    description: Cluster name for specific applications

4. Executable SLA Scheduling (RFC-0025)

Service-level agreements are no longer just documentation—they’re actionable. ODCS v3.1.0 introduces scheduling for SLA properties like latency, retention, availability, and frequency, making SLAs executable alongside data quality rules.

Your contracts can now specify when SLA checks should run, enabling automated monitoring and enforcement of service-level commitments with the same rigor as data quality validation.

slaProperties:
  - property: latency # Property, see list of values in Data QoS
    value: 4
    unit: d 
    element: tab1.txn_ref_dt
    scheduler: cron
    schedule: 0 30 * * *

5. Enhanced Support Channels (RFC-0023)

Getting help should be easy. The support channels section now makes the url field optional, introduces customProperties for flexibility, adds a new scope for notifications, and expands suggested tools to include modern platforms like Google Chat.

Whether your team uses Slack, email, Teams, or custom tooling, ODCS v3.1.0 provides a structured, extensible way to document how consumers can get assistance.

support:
  - id: interactive_teams
    channel: channel-name-or-identifier
    tool: teams
    scope: interactive
    url: https://bitol.io/teams/channel/my-data-contract-interactive
    customProperties:
      - property: someGovernanceAttribute
        value: "Hello, sweet world of data contracts"

6. Smarter Contract Referencing (RFC-0009a & RFC-0009b)

Large organizations need to compose contracts from reusable components. ODCS v3.1.0 approves file-based references for external contracts and introduces convenient table.column shortcuts for internal references.

This makes it easier to build modular contract libraries, reference shared definitions, and maintain consistency across federated data products without duplication.

schema:
  - name: users
    relationships:
      - from: users.account_id
        to: accounts.id
        type: foreignKey

7. Implicit Data Quality Rules (RFC-0012)

Data quality shouldn’t require custom SQL every time. ODCS v3.1.0 introduces a library of predefined, easy-to-use data quality rules, focusing on metrics, like nullValues, missingValues, invalidValues, duplicateValues, and rowCount. These implicit rules are simple to define, executable by any compliant tool, and ensure consistent quality checks across your data ecosystem.

By standardizing common quality patterns, RFC-0012 eliminates repetitive work, reduces errors, and makes data quality more accessible to teams without deep SQL expertise.

properties:
  - name: order_id
    quality:
      - id: order_id_no_nulls
        type: library
        metric: nullValues
        mustBe: 0
        unit: rows
        description: “There must be no null values in the column.”

8. Team Name as First-Class Citizen (RFC-0016)

Ownership matters. ODCS v3.1.0 makes the owning team a first-class property in contracts, enabling clearer team ownership metadata and better lifecycle management. When teams change, when ownership transfers, or when multiple teams collaborate on a data product, RFC-0016 ensures contracts accurately reflect who’s accountable.

This enhancement supports organizational transparency and makes it easier to route questions, incidents, and requests to the right people.

team:
  id: tsc_team
  name: TSC
  description: The greatest team ever.
  members:
    - username: ceastwood
      role: Data Scientist
      dateIn: 2022-08-02

9. Enhanced References (RFC-0026a & RFC-0026b)

ODCS v3.1.0 extends contract capabilities with two complementary enhancements. These RFCs introduce the id field and associated patterns that make contracts more expressive and easier to integrate into existing workflows, supporting both simple and complex organizational scenarios.

schema:
  - id: users_tbl
    name: users
    properties:
      - id: user_id_field
        name: user_id

10. Improved Contract Structure (RFC-0028)

Contracts need to adapt to diverse organizational structures and governance models. RFC-0028 introduces structural improvements that make contracts more fidable and better aligned with real-world data governance patterns, whether you’re managing a single data product or coordinating across a federated data platform.

By leveraging the canonical property as an authoritativeDefinition, you can point to the source copy of a given data contract or data product.

# Data Contract
kind: DataContract
authoritativeDefinitions:
- type: canonicalUrl
  url: https://github.com/mycontract/06af81d9-94b4-4d07-1f6d.odcs.yaml
  description: Canonical URL to the latest version of the contract.

11. A Stricter, More Consistent Schema

Bonus and one of the most critical changes in v3.1.0 is that the JSON Schema is now strict by default. In the past, ODCS tolerated extra fields that weren’t formally defined. This leniency led to inconsistency across tools and made validation unpredictable.

With v3.1.0:

  • Only valid fields are allowed — no more ambiguous extras.

  • Better interoperability across implementations and tools.

  • Higher confidence in validation and contract correctness.

The strict schema ensures that contracts mean the same thing to every tool and team that uses them. You can test your existing contracts against the strict schema today using odcs-json-schema-v3.0.2-strict.json in the repository.

Deprecations: Simplifying for the Future

To keep ODCS focused and maintainable, v3.1.0 deprecates two unused or redundant fields:

  • slaDefaultElement (RFC-0021 & RFC-0022): This field was never widely adopted and added complexity without value. It’s now deprecated (though still tolerated for compatibility).

  • Top-level dataProduct field: This field is deprecated to clarify the separation of concerns between ODCS (which defines contracts) and ODPS (which defines products). Data product information belongs in ODPS, not ODCS.

These deprecations don’t break anything: they’re signals to the community about the preferred path forward.

Why ODCS v3.1.0 Matters

Data contracts are infrastructure. They need to be reliable, expressive, and consistent. ODCS v3.1.0 delivers on all three:

  • No breaking changes: Your existing contracts continue to work.

  • More expressive: Relationships, richer types, executable SLAs, and better metadata.

  • More consistent: Strict validation ensures contracts mean the same thing everywhere.

  • More practical: Scheduling, support channels, and smarter references make contracts easier to use in production.

ODCS v3.1.0 is the result of collaboration among practitioners, tool vendors, and platform engineers from tens of companies across Europe, North America, and Asia. It reflects real-world needs, battle-tested patterns, and a commitment to open, interoperable standards.

All eleven RFCs in this release have been fully integrated, tested, and documented. This is production-ready standard evolution.

Get Started Today

ODCS v3.1.0 is available now:

Test your existing contracts against the strict schema, explore the new features, and consider how relationships, scheduling, and richer metadata can improve your data ecosystem.

Thank You

ODCS v3.1.0 is the product of incredible community collaboration. A huge thank you to everyone who contributed their expertise, energy, and ideas. So many volunteers contributed I cannot mention them all. Special thanks to the TSC:

Andrea Gioia (Quantyca), Andrew Jones (Springer Nature), Andy Petrella (NextLab), Atanas Iliev (ALH Gruppe), Diego Carvallo (Pickle), Dirk Van de Poel (Klarrio), Gene Stakhov (enChoice), Jochen Christ (Entropy Data), Martin Meermeyer (Lidl e-commerce), Peter Flook (Data Catering), Simon Harrer (Entropy Data), Tom De Wolf (ACA Group), and Jean-Georges Perrin (Actian, Chair).

Your contributions make ODCS (and ODPS) stronger, more usable, and more impactful for everyone who believes in product-oriented data engineering and management.

About Bitol

Bitol is a Linux Foundation AI & Data incubation project dedicated to creating open standards for data contracts and data products. Through the Open Data Contract Standard (ODCS) and the Open Data Product Standard (ODPS), Bitol fosters interoperability, trust, and collaboration across modern data platforms.

Learn more at bitol.io and join the conversation on the Data Mesh Learning Community Slack.