Ontos

**Ontos** is a comprehensive Unity Catalog governance and metadata management application designed to run natively as a Databricks App. It empowers data teams to implement data mesh principles by enabling the creation, management, and discovery of Data Products, Data Contracts, and Business Glossaries—all within your Databricks environment.

**Key Benefits:**
- **Data Product Management**: Group and organize Databricks assets (tables, views, functions, models, dashboards) into discoverable data products with proper ownership and governance
- **Data Contracts**: Instrument data products with technical metadata following the Open Data Contract Standard (ODCS), including schema validation, quality checks, and access control
- **Business Glossary**: Maintain hierarchical glossaries that provide semantic context and enable consistent terminology across your organization
- **Role-Based Access Control**: Built-in RBAC with configurable personas (Admin, Data Producer, Data Consumer, Data Steward) to control who can create, edit, or consume data products
- **Compliance & Governance**: Automated compliance scoring and verification to ensure data products meet organizational standards

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## **Use Cases**

- **Data Mesh Implementation**: Enable domain teams to publish and manage their data products independently while maintaining enterprise governance standards
- **Self-Service Data Discovery**: Provide a marketplace-like experience for data consumers to browse, subscribe to, and access certified data products
- **Data Contract-Driven Development**: Establish clear contracts between data producers and consumers before building pipelines, reducing integration issues
- **Business Glossary Management**: Create and maintain organization-wide or domain-specific business terminology to ensure consistent data interpretation
- **Compliance Auditing**: Continuously monitor and score data assets against defined compliance rules with automated notifications for violations
- **Entitlement Management**: Combine access privileges into personas and assign them to directory groups for streamlined permission management

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## **Product Details**

Ontos manages and exposes metadata through the following core datasets:

- **Datasets represented include:** `data_products`, `data_contracts`, `datasets`, `business_glossary_terms`, `compliance_rules`, `entitlements`, `data_asset_reviews`, `settings`, `roles`, and `notifications`.

- **Sample fields include:** `name`, `description`, `domain`, `owner`, `version`, `status` (draft/active/deprecated), `schema_definition`, `quality_checks`, `access_permissions`, `compliance_score`, `created_at`, `updated_at`, and `tags`.

For more details, refer to the embedded notebook.

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## **Additional Insights**

**Standards & Specifications:**
- Built on [BITOL Open Data Contract Standard (ODCS)](https://github.com/bitol-io/open-data-contract-standard) for data contract definitions
- Follows [BITOL Open Data Product Standard (ODPS)](https://github.com/bitol-io/open-data-product-standard) for data product specifications

**Architecture:**
- Runs as a native Databricks App with FastAPI backend and React/TypeScript frontend
- Stores metadata in Lakebase (Postgres) for high availability
- Supports Git sync for configuration version control
- Includes AI-powered "Ask Ontos" feature via LLM serving endpoints

**Resources:**
- GitHub Repository: [https://github.com/databrickslabs/ontos](https://github.com/databrickslabs/ontos)
- License: Databricks (Open Source)