OMEGA · specification
OMEGA protocol specification v1.4.3
Status: published, v1.4.3 current. MIT licensed. The schema set currently defines the aggregate trust-ledger envelope; a normative single-decision record schema is in development. This document defines the schema and field names, not a public runtime that enforces gates.
What this specification establishes
A record structure for governed decisions: who authorised the action, the reasoning chain, the predicted outcome, the confirmation encoding, and the cryptographic provenance. Integrators compose and seal records in their own stacks. The P5 confirmation fields document whether a gate was recorded; they do not block execution. Enforcement is the integrator's responsibility.
Conformance
Two levels. Core requires all five schema-v1.0 fields: P1 governance, P2 reasoning, P3 traceability, P4 expectation, P5 confirmation. Extended records may carry P4M, P4T, P5E, P6, P6A, P6L, PCF, P10, P11, P12 and P14; several of those structured encodings are not yet published. The normative machine-readable schema for the single-decision record is in development.
The fields
Each field is anchored to the refund-escalation example record.
- P1 Governance. The authorised principal, the declared authority, and the limit under which the action was permitted.
- P2 Reasoning. A causal graph of the reasoning, carrying magnitude and likelihood, required to be acyclic, with "unknown" a first-class value.
- P3 Traceability. A SHA-256 hash chain over the record; the content hash seals the decision at commit time.
- P4 Expectation. The outcome expected, written down before the action ran.
- P5 Confirmation. The gate between deciding and acting: the confirmation method and whether a one-time token was issued and consumed.
- P4M, P4T, P5E, P6, P6A, P6L, PCF, P10, P11, P12, P14. Extended fields for materiality binding, trajectory expectation, execution attestation, delegation, aggregate materiality, liability threshold, continuity, competence attestation, expectation-update integrity, semantic-integrity validation, and predicate commitment.
The failure mode each removal enables
The specification maps each field to the failure its removal enables, P1 to ungoverned action, P3 to mutable history, P4M to a decoy prediction, P4T to temporal arbitrage, P10 to perfectly recorded incompetence, P12 to vacuous expectations. That necessity is machine-checked for nine fields in the proof artifact (SymPy), and is design rationale for the rest.
What OMEGA does not claim
OMEGA does not prove a decision was correct, does not prevent bad decisions, and does not replace human judgment. Reasoning is not established as causally connected to the decision unless P2 is bound to actual execution traces. OMEGA does not access model weights or activations: it cannot distinguish genuine reasoning from a perfect post-hoc rationalisation. That last point is named as an honest limit in the doctrine.