Practitioner standard
Data product certification: a standard and a worked contract
By Richard White ·
Free, no form.
Abstract
A product-construction supplement separates processing stages from assurance states and shows the evidence needed to publish and maintain a derived receivables product.
A practical contract for meaning, access, quality and operation, for data product owners, stewards, platform engineers, security teams and release reviewers. Certification records a decision about a version and a scope. It does not follow from a catalog entry, a reachable table or a completed manifest.
The standard defines six lifecycle states (sandbox, managed sandbox, certified, degraded, deprecated, retired), publishes a worked data-product.yaml manifest with digest-pinned evidence references, and defines each field as an enforceable contract. It specifies the release checks and the people who decide them, the triggers that end a certification, and a review date after which reliance lapses.
It is a reference standard to adopt through your own governance, not an external accreditation or a vendor schema.
In the paper
Three passages, as published
A governing principle
A contributor must not obtain certification by editing the word certified.
Immutable evidence
A moving link cannot show what was approved.
Exceptions
The exception cannot silently widen purpose or user entitlement.
Next step
Discuss this paper against your own program.
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