About Data Products

Evolution

As organizations scale their data estates, traditional data management approaches—centered around centralized data lakes, warehouses, and purely technical datasets—begin to show limitations. Data is often difficult to discover, poorly contextualized for business users, inconsistently governed, and tightly coupled to platform teams for access and delivery. While metadata management and data catalogs address discoverability, they alone do not fully address ownership, accountability, usability, or governed consumption.

This gap has led to the evolution of Data Products—a model that treats data not just as a technical asset, but as a business-ready product with clear ownership, quality standards, governance controls, and defined consumption mechanisms.

Data Products and the Influence of Data Mesh

The concept of Data Products is strongly influenced by Data Mesh, a modern architectural and organizational approach that promotes decentralization while maintaining enterprise-wide governance. Data Mesh introduces four core principles:

• Domain-Oriented Ownership: Business domains own and manage their data with accountability.

• Data as a Product: Data is packaged with quality, usability, and value metrics.

• Self-Serve Data Platform: Domains are empowered with standardized tools and infrastructure.

• Federated Computational Governance: Governance is automated, standardized, and enforced consistently across domains.

Within this model, Data Products serve as the primary mechanism for domains to operationalize data ownership, balancing autonomy with governance. Instead of data being exposed as raw tables or unmanaged datasets, it is delivered as a curated, governed, and consumable offering.

Data Products

A Data Product is a curated, governed, and reusable data asset packaged with the necessary metadata, business context, semantics, and access controls, ready for direct consumption by business and technical users.

Unlike standalone datasets, a Data Product represents a complete offering that includes:

• Clearly defined ownership and governance roles

• Business and technical context

• Quality and readiness indicators

• Controlled access and delivery mechanisms

• A lifecycle that supports creation, curation, publication, consumption, and ongoing operations

In essence, a Data Product is not just data—it is data with intent, accountability, and usability, designed to deliver measurable business value.

Purpose in OvalEdge

The Data Products capability in OvalEdge is designed to operationalize the Data Product concept within an enterprise data governance framework. It bridges the gap between metadata management, governance, and data consumption by enabling organizations to:

• Package multiple data assets (tables, files, reports, APIs) into a single governed unit

• Embed governance, quality, lineage, and semantics directly into the product

• Standardize how data is discovered, approved, and consumed through a Marketplace

• Align data domain ownership with federated governance at scale

• Support modern architectures such as Data Mesh while remaining compatible with centralized and hybrid data platforms

By introducing Data Products, OvalEdge enables enterprises to move from cataloging data to delivering trusted, business-ready data products, ensuring that governance is not a bottleneck—but an enabler of scale and self-service.

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