Today, engineers have almost no incentive to take ownership of the data quality they produce outside operational use cases.
If you talk to almost any SWE that is producing operational data which is also being used for business-critical analytics they will probably have no idea who the customers are for that data, how it’s being used, and why it’s important.
database schema as a non-consensual API.
Data Contracts are API-like agreements between Software Engineers who own services and Data Consumers that understand how the business works in order to generate well-modeled, high-quality, trusted, real-time data.
Contracts can be used to create an abstraction between operational data and other downstream consumers of data for analytical purposes.