Data contract
An explicit, versioned agreement between a data producer and its consumers about schema, meaning, quality and freshness.
A data contract turns unspoken expectations into something checkable: the schema, the semantics, quality thresholds, freshness and who to call. It is enforced in CI or at load time. The Open Data Contract Standard (ODCS) is the leading open format.
Example: "OUTSTANDING_BAL_AMT stays DECIMAL(18,2), refreshes daily by 06:00, nulls under 1%."
This site applies the idea to itself: every content file must satisfy schema/item.schema.json before it is published.