Executive Overview SPEC-00
Most organizations describe themselves through the systems they happen to use — an ERP here, a CRM there, a spreadsheet no one remembers the origin of. When a platform changes, the description of the organization changes with it, even though the organization itself did not.
OCOM (Object-Centric Operating Model) takes a different starting point. It describes an organization through the things it manages and the relationships between them — independently of the software used to run it. A customer, a payment, a campaign, a case: each is described once, consistently, in a way that stays valid whether it lives in one system today or a different one next year.
The result is a shared operational language. The same description can be read by a person trying to understand how a business works, by a system that needs to exchange data reliably with another system, and by software that reasons about the organization's operations — without three different, drifting versions of "what a customer is" or "what happens when an order is cancelled."
This is not a product, a database schema, or a piece of software. It is a specification: a set of concepts and rules for describing operational reality, meant to remain stable while the technology underneath changes.
If that idea is useful to you — as an architect trying to bring order to a fragmented landscape, an engineer building something that needs to interoperate, or someone simply trying to understand how a business is put together — the rest of the reading path walks through it in order: what the specification is and why it exists (Chapter 1, Introduction), the principles it is built on (Chapter 2), its core concepts (Chapter 3), the detailed models that follow from them (Chapters 4 to 6: Meta Model, Object Model, Lifecycle Model), how the model is governed (Chapter 7) and how conformance is claimed (Chapter 8).
The specification is governed by a Constitution, Core/Constitution.md, adopted after this reading path was compiled; Chapter 1 states how the two relate.
Revision History
| Version | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 0.2 | 22 July 2026 | Compiled reading path, approved by the Architecture Committee with editorial changes (Specification/Committee Review Package.md). |
| 0.2 | 16 September 2026 | One sentence added pointing to the Constitution; nothing else changed. |
| 1.0 | 17 September 2026 | Version label 1.0; content unchanged apart from the Constitution sentence added on 16 September 2026. |
Source: synthesized from Core/Manifest.md (Abstract, Purpose, Motivation) and the root README.md. No new claims beyond those documents. (16 September 2026: one sentence added pointing to the Constitution; nothing else changed) (17 September 2026: recompiled as v1.0 against the canonical documents as of this date; see Revision History)