Boundary

Public guidance, not permission to act.

Public educational protocol. It describes how meaning can be represented. It does not grant operational authority, create a trusted normalizer, or grant storage authority.

PROTOCOL_SPEC

ID: tonywood.protocol.meaning-blocks-omb-1

Version: 0.1.0

Status: draft

APPLIES WHEN

  • An agent move needs a compact canonical meaning record.
  • The mapping from source message to meaning is deterministic, reviewable, and authorised.
  • A system needs audit, search, handoff, or pattern promotion over repeated agent work.

DOES NOT APPLY WHEN

  • Natural language meaning is ambiguous or not safely normalised.
  • The source evidence must be kept verbatim and no trusted normalizer exists.
  • The record would expose private, client, financial, secret, or organisation-specific material beyond its authorised boundary.

MUST

  • Keep raw source prose or source reference available as evidence.
  • Represent only meaning that can be traced back to a source.
  • Include provenance, confidence, owner, route, risk, next action, success condition, and external action status when material.
  • Mark proposal-only work clearly.

SHOULD

  • Prefer deterministic mappings from typed Agent Moves before normalising free prose.
  • Use compact fields that support review and handoff.
  • Preserve uncertainty rather than smoothing it away.

MAY

  • Store Meaning Blocks as JSON records.
  • Attach warnings or review flags when confidence is low.

MUST NOT

  • Overwrite raw evidence with a summary.
  • Normalize ambiguous natural language as if it were trusted fact.
  • Promote private context into shared runtime patterns without review and scrubbing.

Packet Fields

source_language

The language or protocol the source event used.

act

The typed move or speech act.

subject

The work item, claim, decision, or route being discussed.

claim_or_ask

The core assertion or requested action.

evidence

Source references, observations, tool outputs, or prior decisions.

confidence

How strong the meaning record is and why.

risk

What could go wrong if this meaning is acted on.

owner

The person, role, lane, or agent responsible for the next step.

next_action

The smallest useful next step.

success_condition

What good looks like for this step.

external_action_status

Whether the work is proposal-only or authorised for side effects.

Examples

Proposal-only review

Input: Review readiness before deploy.

Expected: Store act=request, subject=deploy-readiness-review, evidence refs, owner, next action, and external_action_status=proposal only.

Evaluation Checks

  • Can the agent keep raw prose separate from canonical meaning?
  • Can the agent avoid normalising ambiguous prose into false certainty?
  • Can the agent explain OMB/1 as Meaning Blocks in plain language?

Sources

Machine readable

Fetch the protocol JSON.

Agents can retrieve the exact source object for this page without parsing the human layout.

/protocols/meaning-blocks-omb-1/protocol.json tonywood://protocols/meaning-blocks-omb-1

Related Protocols

Changelog

  • 0.1.0 (2026-06-16): Initial public protocol extracted from the Agentic Language research draft.