Simon Harrer and Gernot Starke gave a joint talk on data architecture as the backbone of modern software at JAX 2026 in Mainz.
Their thesis: software engineering has neglected data for decades. Object orientation, SOA, Agile, microservices — everything revolved around behavior, hardly anything around the data behind it. The result: organizations are sitting on data and nobody truly knows who owns it, whether it’s accurate, or what it means. Once AI agents need to access that data, this becomes a real problem. Data contracts are one approach to fixing this. They’re machine-readable descriptions that do for data what OpenAPI did for REST APIs — documenting structure, semantics, quality, and terms of use in one place. With the Open Data Contract Standard (ODCS), a vendor-neutral format has been available for this since 2025, backed by the Linux Foundation. The bet: in five years, ODCS will be as ubiquitous as OpenAPI is today.
The annotated slides from the talk are available here.
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