Building Data Products

Part I. Foundation

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 Part 1 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].

Before you build anything, you need to speak the same language. This part lays the groundwork: what data products actually are, how they differ from data contracts, what standards exist to describe them, and how to start forming the mental model you will carry through the rest of the book. If you skip the foundation, everything you build later will feel like improvisation. If you invest in it, every decision downstream gets easier.

Chapter 1, “Beyond Data Contracts” establishes that data products are far more than passive metadata or glorified schemas. It walks through the 2025 community definition, explains how a data product serves as a single pane of glass for a domain or use case, and introduces the idea that a product can contain multiple artifacts, each independently versioned.

Chapter 2, “Adopting Standards for Data Products” surveys the standards landscape, starting with Bitol’s ODCS and ODPS and extending to other open and proprietary specifications. It makes the case that ...