Palantir Certification Foundry Aware Practice Test

Data contracts define what data exchanges must provide in terms of structure, meaning, and delivery guarantees. In practice, that means three pieces: schemas, which describe the data's shape—field names, types, and nesting; semantics, which specify what each field represents, allowable values, units, and any business rules or validations that ensure the data is interpreted correctly; and SLAs, which lay out the operational expectations for the data flow—how often data is produced, how fresh it needs to be, and the required reliability and latency. The combination ensures downstream systems know exactly what to expect and how to rely on it. If you only specify the structure, you might miss the business interpretation and the timing guarantees; if you only specify semantics, you may know what the data means but not how it's organized or delivered; and without SLAs, there are no explicit commitments about delivery cadence or uptime. For example, a customer feed might require a schema with fields like customer_id, balance, and last_updated; semantics that customer_id is a unique identifier, balance is a non-negative number in USD with two decimals, and last_updated is the timestamp of the record; and SLAs stating updates every 15 minutes with latency under 2 minutes and 99.9% uptime.