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Video Series

Entropy Explains

Portrait of Simon Harrer

Created and narrated by Dr. Simon Harrer

Co-Founder & CEO, Entropy Data

Entropy Explains is a series of short animated explainers on data contracts, data products, and semantics. Each episode explains one concept in under three minutes, with animations instead of slides.

Watch the playlist on YouTube

Coming next

  • How to Get to Your Ontology: answers “How do you build an ontology with AI agents?” Capture the knowledge, let an agent draft concepts and relationships on a branch, and let business people review the diff, a few rounds, before the merge.

Subscribe to the Entropy Explains playlist to get new episodes.

Episodes

Entropy Explains, episode 6: Data Contracts and CI/CD
Episode 6 · 2:40

Data Contracts and CI/CD

Answers: “How do data contracts fit into your CI/CD pipeline?”

One renamed column, three broken consumers, and the data contract knew. Keep it in Git next to the pipeline code and check every pull request with the Data Contract CLI: lint, your own rules, breaking changes, and tests in an isolated environment. After the merge, test in staging and production and publish. Every night, promise monitoring tests production.

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Entropy Explains, episode 5: Put Your Data Under Contract
Episode 5 · 1:56

Put Your Data Under Contract

Answers: “How do you put an existing table under a data contract?”

Your table has been in production for years, and there is no data contract. Import it with the Data Contract CLI, test it right away for a green baseline, and add what only you know: a description, a classification, a quality rule, a freshness promise, and an owner. You go data-first once, then the contract leads.

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Entropy Explains, episode 4: Building Data Products with AI
Episode 4 · 2:08

Building Data Products with AI

Answers: “How do you build a data product with AI?”

Nobody writes data pipelines by hand anymore. A coding agent builds the data product contract-first, from three inputs: a data contract as the what, defined together in a workshop, skills with your conventions as the how, and a data marketplace as the data to build on.

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Entropy Explains, episode 3: Data Contracts and Semantics
Episode 3 · 2:18

Data Contracts and Semantics

Answers: “How do AI agents know what your data means?”

Model the meaning once: an ontology with entities, properties, and relationships, captured in Apache Ossie. Link data contract columns to its concepts so they inherit description and classification, and let AI agents use that anchoring to know how to join data, and what to leave out.

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Entropy Explains, episode 2: Data Contracts and Data Products
Episode 2 · 2:38

Data Contracts and Data Products

Answers: “What is a data product, and how does it relate to data contracts?”

A data product is more than just data: data, code, and metadata as one unit, owned by one team. How it lives in Git as an Open Data Product Standard (ODPS) file, is published to a data marketplace, and moves from v1 to v2 without outages.

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Entropy Explains, episode 1: Data Contracts
Episode 1 · 2:02

Data Contracts

Answers: “What is a data contract, and why do you need one?”

Why data consumers break when data changes, what goes into a data contract in the Open Data Contract Standard (ODCS), and how the open-source Data Contract Editor and Data Contract CLI keep the promise.

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