Invitation to the “Decentralised Semantics Working Group” Launch
In October, the Human Colossus Foundation released the “Overlays Capture Architecture (OCA)” and announced the intent to launch the “Decentralised Semantics Working Group (DSWG)”. The DSWG is where the ongoing active development of OCA and future decentralised semantics standards at the Foundation will occur. A month on, the Foundation is officially launching the DSWG and inviting you to join the kickoff call on Thursday, November 17th, at 17.00 CET.
Decentralised Semantics is an exciting new data domain spearheaded by the Foundation to enable the structuring of unstructured data with morphologic accuracy. It is an essential underpinning of our envisioned Dynamic Data Economy (DDE) and guides tooling development for the DDE Semantic Layer (Layer 1 of the DDE Trust Infrastructure). One of the first tools we created for the Semantic Layer is the recently released OCA, an architecture for capturing the metadata necessary to interpret and preserve the meaning of inputted data.
OCA is the Foundation’s proposed global standard for data capture that promises to significantly enhance the ability to define, manage, and use data in terms of simplicity, accuracy, and allocation of resources. The DSWG will maintain the official OCA Technical Specification, generate Source Code for open-access schemas, and create and maintain related datasets and assets to benefit the OCA Ecosystem (a reference implementation of the OCA specification). We also expect to discover further standardisation and tooling needs for Decentralised Semantics through the Working Group.
Paul Knowles and Ryan Barrett will co-chair the DSWG. Paul is a co-founder of the Foundation and the Head of our Advisory Council. Paul plays an instrumental role in identifying and defining Decentralised Semantics. He is also the inventor of OCA, the brainchild of his over 20 years of experience in roles spanning different stages of the data management cycle. Ryan is an independent Tech Lead/Architect with over 20 years of experience building and designing reliable and innovative software systems. He currently represents the Dutch Ministry of Health as a Technical Architect after playing a leading role in the pandemic Contact Tracing and Vaccination Passport systems.
The Working Group will meet biweekly on Thursday at 5 pm CET. We will release more information about how to join the Working Group and contribute on the website. For the kickoff call, we will walk through the DSWG Charter, provide an overview of the current status of OCA, give a brief synopsis of the short-term roadmap, and describe the standard Request for Comment (RFCs) lifecycle for OCA development.
To learn more about Decentralised Semantics and OCA before the kickoff, we recommend the following resources:
The New Blog Post - “A quest for accurate data (Part 1)” [Link]
The Academic Paper - “Decentralised semantics in distributed ecosystems” [Link]
The OCA Technical Specification [Link]
We look forward to meeting you at the Decentralised Semantics Working Group kickoff meeting on Thursday, November 17th, at 17.00 CET!