The Human Colossus Foundation Releases “Overlays Capture Architecture”

Written By Lucy Yang

Geneva, Switzerland, October 2022 

After releasing the Dynamic Data Economy (DDE) v1.0 architecture in July 2022, the Human Colossus Foundation announces the release of Overlays Capture Architecture (OCA). OCA enables “Textual Integrity”, an essential DDE Principle of the DDE Trust Infrastructure’s Structure Layer, by providing an interoperable solution for data capture and exchange, agnostic to existing data models and representation formats. The release includes the launch of the OCA website, which hosts the OCA v1.0 specification and reference implementation, and the announcement of the Decentralised Semantics Working Group (DSWG), the formal governing body for further developing the official OCA specification.

Paul Knowles, a Co-Founder and the Head of the Advisory Council of the Foundation, is the architect of an entirely new data domain, Decentralised Semantics. His conceptual modelling of this new domain led to the invention of OCA, which provides a data harmonisation solution within and across distributed data ecosystems to ensure the textual integrity of any digital object and its relationships with other objects. OCA facilitates semantic interoperability and privacy-compliant data sharing throughout any DDE-compliant ecosystem, offering a comprehensive solution for defining deterministic metadata, structuring digital objects, and harmonising data payloads.

"OCA is a core utility architecture for capturing the metadata necessary to interpret and preserve the meaning of inputted data. ‘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 textual 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. 

Before co-founding the Human Colossus Foundation, my previous life was as a "data wrangler" in the pharmaceutical industry, repeatedly encountering data aggregation issues when working with supposedly "clean data" supplied by my colleagues in data management. So, after 20 years as a statistical programmer, I took the plunge and transitioned to the sharp end of data capture as a data architect. From that new vantage point, I gained valuable insights into the cause of many of the data aggregation issues I had encountered further upstream, which continued to cost the company millions of dollars daily. I also found that I was in an influential position to improve the company's internal semantic architectural design initiatives.

So, four years later, after bidding farewell to that esteemed position as a corporate data architect with nothing more than a conceptual draft of a layered architecture for data capture written in the back of my notebook, I'm excited to announce the rollout of OCA as a global solution for data harmonisation at scale. What a journey it has been. 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

Decentralised Semantics and OCA

Data Semantics is the study of the meaning and use of data in any digital environment that focuses on how a data object represents a concept or object in the real world. Decentralised Semantics is an emergent domain that provides enhanced data modelling for an evolving data-agile economy comprising distributed data ecosystems where harmonisation between competing standards is essential for data object comprehension in any bilateral exchange.

This new data domain recognises the reality of standardisation complexities in an ever-evolving digital landscape of peer-to-peer interactions not addressed 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. Therefore, the harmonisation process must occur at the earliest stage of the life cycle, the point of initial data capture, where its textual meaning is fresh and more manageable than further upstream. 

It is critical to double down on investments in Decentralised Semantics, including supportive standards and tools, because, by most estimates, unstructured data accounts for at least 80-90% of the digital data universe, and current solutions often disregard the data harmonisation process, leaving no guarantee of the data's textual integrity throughout a given lifecycle. We invented OCA to offer a comprehensive solution for data harmonisation at the Structure Layer (Layer 1 in the DDE Trust Infrastructure Stack) so that machines and people can precisely understand the intended contextual use of accurate data across distributed data ecosystems.

Explaining OCA through a Use Case

Overlays Capture Architecture (OCA) marks a new paradigm shift in “Textual Integrity”, with "Overlays" providing the necessary separation of granular tasks to enable seamless semantic interoperability across sectoral and jurisdictional boundaries. An "OCA bundle" consists of a "Capture Base" and "Overlays", which in amalgamation, represent a textually-rich schema.

Figure 1. Overlays Capture Architecture (OCA) offers a data harmonisation solution within and across data ecosystems.

This separation of tasks into task-specific objects facilitates the core pillars of the FAIR Guiding Principles, where all objects should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) for machines and people. In addition, the granular separation of semantic “overlays'' enables distributed custodianship of specific objects within a bundle where the responsibility of separate tasks can reside with different actors without compromising the textual integrity of the overall semantic structure. As a result, actors from various institutions can contribute to defining schemas for complex use cases, supply chains, and data flows supported by multi-stakeholder data governance administrations and frameworks.

Take Switzerland as an example, a quadrilingual country with German, French, Italian, and Romansh as its national languages and many other minority languages, such as English, becoming increasingly important. The Swiss Constitution Article 70 lets the sovereign cantons define their official language to preserve linguistic harmony in their jurisdiction. The Swiss federal government would enable a collaborative solution to internationalisation by using OCA to separate language-specific overlays from any capture bases and core language-agnostic overlays issued by the federal government. Different cantons will be able to control and maintain their sets of language-specific overlays depending on their primary spoken language. In other words, distributed custodianship of language-specific overlays would enable regional authorities to manage the official translation of any document issued by a national federal government into their region’s official language(s).

Figure 2. The distributed custodianship of language-specific overlays would enable cantonal authorities to translate official digital documents issued by the Swiss national federal government into their region’s official language(s).

How to Get Involved

We hope you are as excited as we are about the release of OCA and the imminent launch of our Decentralised Semantics Working Group, a pre-standardisation engine room for defining and demonstrating new overlay types before presenting the architecture to an official standards body. 

The Human Colossus Foundation is home to a dedicated community of stakeholders actively developing DDE public utilities and components. The launch of the OCA website offers a comprehensive public resource for the latest OCA developments, including access to the following core documentation:

The best way to connect with us over OCA is to join the OCA community group, which is open to everyone. In the meantime, sign up for our newsletter to stay tuned for the official launch of the Decentralised Semantics Working Group.

Lucy Yang

Lucy is an active volunteer at the Human Colossus Foundation supporting our business strategy and marketing work.

Lucy is an entrepreneurial and resourceful business leader and advisor experienced in taking projects off the ground. She has a wealth of management experience in technology, such as digital identity, health systems, blockchain, and data management. She is particularly skilled at crafting and implementing go-to-market strategy and helping large and complex organizations make strategic investments in emerging technology.

Lucy is a Partner and Principal at Identity Woman in Business, where she consults with organizations across of the world to help them succeed in adopting, developing and investing in Decentralized Identity. While at Linux Foundation Public Health, Lucy led the COVID Credentials Initiative and initiated the Global COVID Certificate Network (GCCN), which has attracted attention from UN agencies and governments across the world. She is currently managing the GCCN project at the United Nation Development Programme (UNDP), where the team has a focus on leveraging GCCN to provide critical and affordable trust infrastructures for Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs).

Lucy holds an MBA from the University of Toronto and a master’s degree in anthropology from China. 

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