Semantic data contracts

Semantic data contracts are an alternative to traditional governance APIs for decentralized data management in data mesh architectures. They embed governance directly into data pipelines, defining both structure and meaning, and can be managed as code using tools like GitHub, offering a flexible and adaptable approach to modern data engineering. Semantic data contracts include schema definition, semantic definition, data quality rules, access policies, business rules, and usage docs, allowing for collaboration between business and technical people and enabling safe migrations without obstacles. They aim to empower organizations to maintain high data quality and compliance while sacrificing agility or innovation, and can be used to enable portability of data catalogs and build a portable data lake.