Standard
How to read O2A as a shared language of organizational and economic meaning.
Standard
O2A — Open Organization Alliance — is a semantic standard: a shared language for what organizational and economic things mean. It is the first of O2A's three layers — the shared definitions, distinct from the configuration an organization authors and the runtime data it records. The standard is a set of plain-English statements of meaning, distinct from code, a protocol, or a product workflow, and you can read and reference these statements together without needing software architecture to make sense of them.
How It Works
The standard is built from atomic statements. Each statement records exactly one thing: a meaning, a relationship, an attribute, an action, a constraint, a lifecycle, or a derived financial view. Statements may reference other statements in the same standard, so meanings can build on each other without external context. Taken together, the statement set is self-contained for public semantic reading — a reader can understand it on its own terms.
Statements
The statements below state each rule precisely.
- O2A is a semantic standard.
- The O2A standard is a set of normal-English statements of meaning.
- A statement records one meaning, relationship, attribute, action, constraint, lifecycle, or derived financial view.
- Statements can reference other statements in the same artifact.
- The statement set is self-contained for public semantic reading.
Why It Matters
Because O2A is a standard rather than an implementation, different teams can build different software on top of the same meanings and still interoperate. O2A defines the meaning; implementations may realize it differently. Treating it as a semantic and ontological description keeps the standard portable and lets every other page in this site cite the same fixed vocabulary — the contract that makes Composition, Configuration, and the entity pages legible.
Related
- What Is O2A — identity, intent, and scope of the standard.
- How To Read O2A — the reader path through the model.
- Model Map — the public concept surface at a glance.