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Open Intent Schema

What is the Open Intent Schema (OIS)?

The Open Intent Schema (OIS) is an open, vendor-neutral data standard that links what was required to what was produced and to the evidence that it meets the requirement.

AI agents now write requirements, code and tests. Teams can no longer show, in a verifiable way, that a delivered feature does what was asked: requirements, code, tests and results live in separate tools, and a generated test often confirms what was built rather than what was required. OIS records the link between them as data that any tool can produce and any party can check.

Think of OIS as an SBOM for requirements. An SBOM lists what software contains; OIS states what it must do and how that is proven.

From the requirement to the release: an intent with acceptance criteria, the artifacts produced for it, the evidence for each criterion, the decisions at quality gates and the Quality Passport that collects them

What can OIS record?

Section titled “What can OIS record?”
  • What was required: intents with acceptance criteria in Gherkin, EARS or plain text, versioned and immutable once approved.
  • What was produced, and by whom: code, tests, contracts and datasets by location and digest, each with the human, agent or tool that made it and what it was given.
  • What proves it: one evidence record per test run and criterion, stating whether the test was derived from the requirement or from the code.
  • What was decided: approvals and gate outcomes, bound to the exact content they approved.
  • What went wrong: findings from production or test, closed only by an independent decision.

Why does OIS matter?

Section titled “Why does OIS matter?”
  • Independent evidence becomes checkable. A validator can confirm that a test came from a different actor than the code and never saw it, instead of taking it on trust.
  • Releases carry their proof. A signed Quality Passport lets an auditor, a customer or a regulator verify a release without access to internal tools.
  • No lock-in. OIS is a data format with open rules, built on in-toto, DSSE, Sigstore, SLSA, Gherkin, EARS and JSON Schema. It does not prescribe tools, agents or workflows.
  • Start where you are. The JUnit XML your pipeline already writes becomes OIS records without changing a test, an honest baseline from which intent coverage grows.

Start building

Section titled “Start building”
Getting startedTurn existing test results into your first OIS bundle in about 15 minutes.
Core conceptsThe six record types, how they reference each other, and the conformance levels.
SpecificationThe normative data model, integrity rules, Quality Passport and conformance.
Reference validatorCheck records, bundles and passports against the schema and every rule.

Status and community

Section titled “Status and community”

Specification v0.1 is a working draft, developed in the open with design partners from regulated industries. Any part may change before 1.0. Changes are proposed and decided in public RFCs under the project’s governance, and the editors intend to transfer the specification to a neutral foundation.