What is OCOM? SPEC-E1
OCOM — the Object-Centric Operating Model — is an open specification for modelling an organization as a set of interconnected, governable Objects.
It is a machine-authoritative model: one canonical source usable equally by a human, an LLM, an API, a validator and a compiler. This document does not restate any definitions; each concept is defined once in the Core Vocabulary and referenced from here.
References
Why OCOM exists SPEC-E2
Organizations describe the same reality many times over — in process tools, data models, wikis and spreadsheets — with no single governed source.
OCOM gives every operational object one canonical identity, with governance, lifecycle, ownership and evidence attached, so that humans and machines reason over the same authoritative model instead of many divergent copies.
Design Principles SPEC-E3
OCOM is shaped by a small set of principles: Object-Centric Reality, Evidence Before Belief, a Domain-Neutral Core, Extensibility Over Enumeration, and Governance by Default.
These principles are why the model favours one canonical source with many projections over a single monolithic document.
Core Vocabulary SPEC-E4
The OCOM Specification defines the following core concepts. Each is defined normatively in the Core Vocabulary; this section only lists and links them.
Architecture SPEC-E5
OCOM is memory-first: a single canonical knowledge model is the source of truth, and every publication — HTML, JSON, JSON-LD, Markdown, a knowledge graph, an API — is a deterministic projection of it, never a parallel source.
The graph, the registries and the retrieval API are all views of the same records, which is why they cannot drift apart.
References
Governance SPEC-E6
New core concepts are not added directly. A candidate is observed, reviewed, and only then proposed through a Reference Case and an Architecture Objection before any change is accepted.
Concepts the model refers to but has not yet defined are surfaced automatically as governance candidates rather than silently adopted.
References
See also Conformance
Conformance SPEC-E7
An implementation conforms to OCOM when every managed object satisfies the requirements of the Core Vocabulary terms it uses.
The normative conformance requirements are stated in the Normative Specification.
See also Conformance