PUBLIC WORKING STANDARD · ORI v0.1 DRAFT

The open regulatory interface underneath the portals.

OpenPermit is the reference implementation of Open Regulatory Infrastructure (ORI): a permissionless, vendor-neutral substrate for governments, practitioners, software and models to inventory, publish, traverse, verify, measure and challenge regulatory processes.

This is the current ORI/OpenPermit project in corelotorg/OpenPermit — not the legacy 2016 OpenPermit API or the real-estate phrase “open permit.” Project: openpermit.io · developers, specification and benchmark: openpermit.dev. The public site is moving to this repository; until the domains point here, read it from GitHub.

Read the charterORI CoreMachine discovery
jurisdiction → approval → authority → requirement → evidence → reviewer → deadline → fee → status → decision

Cold clone. Validate. Run.

A stranger should not need a meeting to determine whether the contract is real. These commands exercise schemas, negative semantic controls, the precedence engine and the MCP reference node.

git clone https://github.com/corelotorg/OpenPermit.git cd OpenPermit python -m pip install -r conformance/requirements.txt -r reference-node/requirements.txt -r verification/requirements.txt python conformance/validate.py python -m pytest -q reference-node/test_graph.py adapters/blds rules verification/tests python reference-node/smoke.py python reference-node/server.py

Local MCP: http://127.0.0.1:8000/mcp · health: /health · discovery: /.well-known/ori.json. No SaaS account, API key, model provider or database is required for reference mode.

Plan checks: evidence, never approval.

ORI encodes the code requirements for detached single-family new homes (2021 IRC base, 2021 Virginia Residential Code override layer) as cited rule units with ORI's own paraphrases, and checks synthetic IFC models and PDF plan sets against them. Every result is evidence for the reviewer; the building official decides.

A machine check is never approvalA pass approves nothing. Results carry reason codes and evidence for a human reviewer.
Unknown is not failMissing, unreadable or unconfirmed information gives unknown, never fail.
No building-code textSections are cited and linked, never reproduced. Releases are checked for any run of six or more words shared with the code.
Public benchmarkSynthetic pass, fail and incomplete models, PDF plan sets and expected reports are in the repository.
Open the verifierRule units

Jurisdiction inventories, with sources and gaps.

An inventory records a jurisdiction's published authorities, application inputs, fees, inspections, appeal context and a simplified precedence slice, and lists what remains unknown instead of manufacturing completeness. The public conformance suite runs on a synthetic example jurisdiction.

Authority

State adoption + local enforcement

Code adoption and local enforcement are separately addressable and sourced.

Application

Published inputs

Required documents and data are represented as published evidence requirements.

Fees

Effective schedule

Fees carry amounts or rates, effective date and source.

Inspections

Gaps preserved

Where a published list is incomplete, the inventory says so.

Process graph

Precedence, not fiction

A simplified DAG exposes the documented sequence and warns about what is not yet mapped.

Appeal

Challenge path

Published appeal routes are preserved without asserting outcomes.

No municipality is a pilot, partner or reviewer of ORI. No real jurisdiction's inventory is published.

Open the synthetic exampleInventory schema

Conformance must prove it can fail.

JSON matching a schema is necessary, not sufficient. The harness now includes negative semantic fixtures that must be rejected.

Mapping-as-fact → rejectNormalized mapping semantics must live in a MappingAssertion.
Guidance-as-law → rejectGuidance authority cannot be silently serialized as a binding Requirement.
Challenge mutation → rejectA challenge cannot rewrite the object it challenges.
Cyclic PrecedenceGraph → rejectA graph declared as precedence must actually be acyclic.
Inspect negative fixturesInspect reference node
Boundary: structural or semantic conformance does not prove legal correctness, jurisdictional applicability, professional authority or regulatory approval.

A concrete federal implementation target.

The HUD 2026 profile converts State and Local Best Practices for Home Construction into computable controls, evidence and measurements. It is federal guidance — not silently promoted to binding local law and not an endorsement of OpenPermit. The profile and method are public; per-municipality rubric scores are secured.

HUD practice → implementation control → evidence → measurement → alignment result
Publish approvals and inspectionsJurisdiction manifest, approval inventory, authority mapping.
Publish development feesMachine-readable fee schedules, authority and effective version.
End unnecessary multiple reviewsDependency graph and duplicate-review candidate analysis.
Measure shot clocksStart/completion events, deadlines, tolling events and cycle-time telemetry.
AI and technology accelerationDeterministic checks first, assisted interpretation second, authority preserved.
Third-party reviewCredential issuer, authorized scope, portable evidence and attestation.
Open HUD profile

Regulation as addressable evidence and graph.

source → provision → mapping assertion → requirement → verification → decision ↘ challenge → evidence → disposition
ORI Core v0.1 draftProvenance, authority, graph, verification, challenge and conformance.Core JSON SchemaExecutable structural contract.Model InterfaceMCP-first operations with transport-independent semantics.Challenge ProtocolAppend-only challenge and disposition semantics.llms.txtCompact model-facing map of the corpus./.well-known/ori.jsonMachine-readable discovery entry point.

Open at every seam.

Jurisdictions, agencies, standards bodies, code officials, builders, engineers, inspectors, universities, civic-tech maintainers, cloud providers, AI/model providers, permitting vendors, manufacturers, suppliers and specialist validators can publish compatible profiles, mappings, validators, evidence formats and compute capabilities. Registration is discovery, not trust.

ContributeGovernanceChallenge / issue