After releasing the Dynamic Data Economy (DDE) v1.0 architecture in July 2022, the Human Colossus Foundation announced the release of Overlays Capture Architecture (OCA), enabling “Objectual Integrity,” an essential DDE Principle of the DDE Trust Infrastructure’s Semantic Layer (Layer 1).

OCA emerges from a new domain - Decentralised Semantics, modelled by our Co-Founder Paul Knowles. This new data domain recognises the reality of standardisation complexities in an ever-evolving digital landscape of peer-to-peer interactions that need addressing today; examples of gaps include inaccurate use of data due to its misinterpretation at the point of exchange. In other words, upstream data comprehension erodes without well-defined metadata at the start of the data lifecycle. We invented OCA to offer a comprehensive solution for data harmonisation so that machines and people can precisely understand the intended use of accurate data in the correct context across distributed data ecosystems.

• OCA is a data harmonisation solution to ensure the textual integrity of any digital object and its relationships with other objects within and across data ecosystems.

“‘Characters’ provide the essential elements required for written language in the physical world. In the digital world, stored sequences of bytes known as ‘data’ represent these elements. However, without a system of interpretation, data has no inherent morphological, definitional, or contextual meaning. OCA enables this interpretation by providing an architecture to capture the ‘metadata’, sets of data that provide meaning to any stored sequence of bytes. In addition, OCA introduces a comprehensive solution to support data collection, validation, transformation, and presentation requirements throughout a data lifecycle.

I'm excited to announce the rollout of OCA as a global solution for data harmonisation at scale. I look forward to our continued journey together to take OCA to the next level of technical maturity while helping many of you resolve data harmonisation issues with OCA and the supportive tooling we are developing at the Foundation."

- Paul Knowles, Co-Founder and the Head of the Advisory Council of the Foundation

OCA Specification - If you are a business or data manager, we recommend that you start learning more about OCA with the OCA specification, which includes an overview of the technology and its technical specification.