State what the data product promises before another team reuses it.
Meridian assembles one contract out of the work you already confirmed in Curate, Conform, Clean and Certify, then asks you for the three things it has no standing to invent: who holds it, what it guarantees, and how people get it. Download the result in the Open Data Product Standard.
Four artefacts, four owners, no single answer.
The business case is in a deck, the model is in a diagramming tool, the quality rules are in an engine, and the certification is a PDF somebody emailed. A team wanting to reuse the data has to find all four, work out which are current, then ask around for the parts nobody wrote down at all: who owns it, how fresh it is, and whether they are allowed to use it.
So they build their own instead. That is how a second version of the same number arrives, and the effort spent agreeing the first one is spent again from scratch. What is missing is not more documentation. It is one document saying what this product is and what it promises, assembled from the decisions already taken.
One contract, assembled from work you have already confirmed
Assemble one contract for the data product out of the work you already confirmed in Curate, Conform, Clean and Certify, plus the few promises only you can make, then take it away as a file your catalogue can read.
Assembled, not retyped
The data shape comes from your Conform blueprint, the rules from your Clean library, the purpose and audience from your Curate canvas, and the result from Certify. Four artefacts become one document without you copying anything across.
The three things only you can say
Who holds the product, what service levels you are committing to, and how people get access. Meridian never invents these, because they are promises your organisation makes and it has no standing to make them for you.
Gaps named, not hidden
Every section that says nothing yet is listed, with the step to open and fix it. The Completeness Score counts sections carrying content. It cannot tell you whether a service-level target is sensible, and it does not pretend to.
It points at your tools, it does not replace them
Meridian has never seen your systems, so it cannot trace where a number came from. What the contract carries instead is the source system you declared for each attribute in Conform, and a link to whichever tool you already use to trace it.
Four steps of decisions, gathered into one document
Meridian fills in every section it can derive from the canvas, the blueprint, the rule library and the certification. What it cannot know are the promises your organisation makes: who holds the product, what it guarantees, and how people get it. Those three are only ever typed by you.
Meridian pulls in every section it can derive from Curate, Conform, Clean and Certify, and shows you where each one came from.
Fill in the three it cannot know: who holds the product, the service levels you are committing to, and how people get access.
Work through the gaps with the mentor, deciding what the product actually promises rather than accepting a default.
Confirm the contract, then download it as YAML or JSON. Nothing is published anywhere, and nothing is registered on your behalf.
What you walk away with
The data-product contract
Eight sections in one place: the product, why it matters, who holds it, the data shape, the rules it must meet, service levels, how people get it, and its certification.
The gap list
Which sections are still empty, and where to go to fill each one. You can finish with gaps standing: the contract states its own status rather than hiding them.
A file your catalogue can read
Download the contract as YAML or JSON, written in the Open Data Product Standard with an Open Data Contract Standard contract inside it. Your team registers it in your own catalogue; Meridian publishes nothing.
Meridian is an external mentor, not another pipeline
Meridian never connects to your systems, and downloading a contract publishes nothing. The file describes a data product your own team registers in your own catalogue, which is why the contract states plainly that nothing in it has been checked against a running system.
Say what it promises, in one place
The work is already done across four steps. Connect puts it into one contract, asks you for the promises only your organisation can make, and hands you the file.
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