Building Data Products

Chapter 2. Adopting Standards for Data Products

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be the 2nd chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

Imagine a world where every website required a different browser, and each browser used its own proprietary language to display content. That world almost happened. In the early days of the internet, companies like Netscape (with Netscape tags) and Microsoft (with VBScript and ActiveX) pushed their own formats. If they had won, the web would be a fragmented mess.

Thankfully, HTML, an open standard, prevailed. It became the lingua franca of the web, allowing anyone to build, anyone to consume, and everyone to innovate.

The same tipping point is happening with data.

Without shared standards, each team becomes a silo, building incompatible formats, reinventing wheels, and shipping fragile integrations. But with the rise of open, community-driven standards, like the Open Data Contract Standard (ODCS) and the Open Data Product Standard (ODPS) from the Bitol project at the Linux Foundation, we finally have the HTML moment for data.

These standards ...