Glossary

The Ontological Glossary provides formal definitions for the technical and philosophical terminology utilized within the Open Microservice Initiative (OMI). This lexicon ensures that contributors, architects, and stakeholders maintain a shared semantic understanding of the initiative’s core postulates.

A

Atomic Responsibility The architectural mandate that a microservice must encapsulate a single, discrete business domain. By adhering to this principle, services remain granular enough to be truly interchangeable and prevent the emergence of “distributed monoliths.”

C

CRUD Ritual The repetitive and idiosyncratic process of manually engineering Create, Read, Update, and Delete operations for common business objects. OMI seeks to eliminate this ritual by providing standardized, already-deployed primitives for these recurring tasks.

D

Domain Ontology A rigorous, standardized specification of the data structures and communication semantics within a specific business sector (e.g., Identity, Financial Orchestration, or Content Management). These ontologies prevent semantic drift across the service swarm.

I

Idempotency A technical property ensuring that an operation can be performed multiple times without changing the result beyond the initial application. In the OMI framework, idempotency is a mandatory requirement for operational resilience in distributed environments.

M

Micro-Symmetry A state of architectural alignment where the internal logic and external interface of a service perfectly reflect the boundaries of its business domain, facilitating frictionless integration into larger composite systems.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) An open communication standard that allows AI agents to programmatically discover, inspect, and execute OMI-compliant services as “tools,” enabling the transition from manual coding to autonomous orchestration.

O

Ontological Standards The codified rules and schemas that define the “universal truth” of data objects within the initiative. These standards ensure that a “User” or “Transaction” object remains semantically identical across different service providers.

S

Semantic Drift The gradual divergence in the interpretation or structure of identical data types across different service implementations. This drift is the primary cause of high-friction integrations and is mitigated by OMI’s domain ontologies.

Service Composition The strategic process of assembling a functional digital system by orchestrating pre-existing, standardized OMI primitives, as opposed to the traditional “Service Construction” approach where backend logic is built from scratch.

Systemic Independence The requirement that an OMI-compliant service must operate autonomously, maintaining its own state and logic without direct reliance on the internal data structures of external services.

U

Ubiquitous Backend The vision of a global ecosystem of thousands of specialized, standalone services that are always available for programmatic consumption, effectively treating backend logic as a utility similar to electricity or telecommunications.