OpenLineage is an open standard for collecting data lineage: information about which datasets, jobs and runs produce and consume data. It defines an API for lineage events, client libraries for common programming languages, and integrations with orchestrators, transformation tools and query engines. Data teams use it to trace the root cause of pipeline failures and to assess the impact of changes. Many different tools adopt it, each sending its events to a backend of the user's choice.
OpenLineage is published under the Apache-2.0 licence and is a graduated project of LF AI & Data, a foundation hosted by the Linux Foundation, which is a US non-profit. It has no vendor-operated cloud, so the location of lineage data depends on the backend an organisation deploys. For a European organisation, OpenLineage is therefore a self-hosted building block: lineage metadata can stay on its own infrastructure, and the open licence allows the code to be audited and run without a vendor contract. The project's governance is subject to US non-profit law.