Author a data contract using the Open Data Contract Standard (ODCS) YAML spec

Steps

1. Start the file with apiVersion (e.g. v3.1.0) and kind: DataContract, the two fields that identify the document as an ODCS contract.
2. Fill in identity/ownership fields — id, name, version, status, domain, dataProduct, tenant, description — so the contract is discoverable and attributable to an owning team.
3. Define the schema block describing the dataset's fields, types, and per-field quality expectations, following ODCS's own full example YAML rather than improvising field names.
4. Add a quality section for dataset-level checks and slaProperties for freshness/availability commitments if consuming systems need to assert on those.
5. Confirm you're on a current spec version — ODCS v3.1.0 is documented as backward-compatible with contracts written for v3.0.2, so bumping the apiVersion string alone shouldn't break an existing contract.
6. Validate the contract structurally before relying on it in CI — exact tooling varies by adopter, so confirm what your organization's data contract tooling expects rather than assuming a specific CLI.