Service Mechanics
The Service Mechanics section defines the technical postulates that govern how OMI-compliant services communicate, secure data, and manage state.
While Domain Ontologies define the “nouns” of the ecosystem (the data structures), the Service Mechanics define the “verbs” and the “infrastructure”—the standardized machinery that ensures a service is not just functional, but universally integrable.
The Foundations of Service Autonomy
In the OMI framework, the internal implementation of a service is the proprietary concern of the provider. However, the external interface is a public mandate. To achieve the “Ubiquitous Backend,” every service must adhere to a strict set of mechanical standards:
Uniform Communication Semantics: Every OMI service utilizes a standardized approach to REST System Endpoints and Error Handling, ensuring that integration logic written for one service is instantly applicable to any other service in the swarm.
Cryptographic Trust: Rather than relying on centralized API keys or proprietary login flows, the OMI mandates a decentralized Authentication & Authorization model based on RSA-signed payloads. This ensures that trust is portable across different vendors.
Resilience & Scalability: Standardized protocols for Rate Limiting, Caching, and Idempotency are not optional features; they are foundational requirements that protect the integrity of the distributed system under load.
Asynchronous Orchestration: Through the Standardized Webhook Envelope (SWE), services can be “piped” together. This allows for complex workflows to be composed without the services ever having direct knowledge of one another.
Toward Zero-Configuration Integration
The ultimate goal of these mechanics is the elimination of the “Bespoke Integration” phase of development. When every service handles Versioning, Advanced Querying, and Telemetry in the exact same way, the cost of switching providers or adding new capabilities drops to near zero.
By implementing these protocols, you are ensuring that your service can be discovered and utilized by both human architects and autonomous AI agents (via the Model Context Protocol) as a reliable, predictable, and high-trust primitive.
Navigating the Protocols
The following pages provide the formal specifications for each mechanical component. Compliance with these standards is a prerequisite for OMI Certification: