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Our Data Contracts Paper is Accepted at ICWS 2026

We are happy to share that our paper Data Contracts: Structuring Promises and Expectations in Data Exchange has been accepted for publication in the proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS) 2026.

The paper is joint work by Laura Schuiki (University of Stuttgart), Arif Wider (HTW Berlin), and Simon Harrer (Entropy Data). It continues a line of research presented at ICWS over the past years on decentralized data governance and data mesh.

What the paper is about

Most interpretations treat data contracts as one-sided, provider-driven artifacts — a provider stating SLAs and a schema to its consumers. But robust data exchange in enterprise data landscapes is more complex: consumers also have expectations, providers have expectations of how their data is used, and consumers make promises about how they will handle it.

The paper proposes a general concept of data contracts that captures all four of these aspects explicitly:

• Provider promises — what a provider guarantees about its data product (schema, SLAs, update frequency).
• Consumer expectations — what a consumer needs from existing or not-yet-existing data products.
• Provider expectations — obligations and restrictions a provider places on data usage.
• Consumer promises — how a consumer agrees to handle the data and comply with the terms.

Making all four aspects explicit enables higher levels of data governance automation — for example, automatically matching consumers with data products that fulfill their needs — and reduces the risk of data incidents that arise when expectations and promises stay implicit. The paper also analyzes how the Open Data Contract Standard (ODCS) and the Open Data Product Standard (ODPS) support the concept, validated through expert interviews across three companies.

Read the paper

You can read more about our work on the research page or download the paper directly.