About

About AOW

AOW is an open ontology for enterprise work performed by AI agents, people, and systems. Version 2.0 was published in September 2026.

Background

The SOA-to-Agentic AI Terminology Mapping (https://skandotai.github.io/soa-to-agentic-terms/) maps 28 Service-Oriented Architecture terms to agentic equivalents. The two projects are complementary. The mapping standardizes terminology.

AOW specifies the relationships between the concepts. For example, an Intent serves an Objective, a Result is generated by an Action, and an Action is performed by an Actor. Systems that follow the same relationships can exchange a consistent record of what work was done, by whom, and why.

SOA followed the same sequence. Its vocabulary was later formalized as an ontology by The Open Group and standardized as ISO/IEC 18384-3.

Differences from SOA

Services execute fixed operations. Agents interpret goals, plan, and act with varying autonomy. AOW therefore adds concepts that SOA did not require: graded autonomy, confidence thresholds, recorded human approvals, and traceable feedback.

Scope

Implementation. AOW does not assume any vendor, model, or agent framework.
Protocols. AOW does not define a communication protocol. MCP and A2A transport work between agents and tools. AOW describes the work.
Policy languages. AOW does not define a policy language. A Policy may contain rules in ODRL, Rego, Cedar, DMN, or plain text.
Open questions. Governance across organizations, negotiation between agents, and confidence calibration are not yet addressed. See whitepaper section 15.

Changes from version 1.0

Version 1.0 was published in January 2026. Version 2.0:

adds eight classes: Work Item, Signal, Observation, Plan, Task, Actor, Human Actor, and Role
defines Action and specifies that Actions produce Results
defines the Assurance Level scale, AL0 to AL4
records provenance and versioning on every entity using W3C PROV-O
publishes the ontology in OWL, JSON-LD, SHACL, and JSON Schema, with validated examples
adds an automated check for each validation criterion

Full list of changes: https://github.com/Skandotai/agentic-ontology-of-work/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md

Version 1.0 PDF: https://skandotai.github.io/agentic-ontology-of-work/downloads/agentic-ontology-of-work-v1.0.pdf

Author and publisher

Author: Manish Garg, Skan.ai (https://www.linkedin.com/in/manishga)

Publisher: Skan, Inc. (https://www.skan.ai)

AOW is not a specification of any Skan.ai product.

Contributing

Submit issues at https://github.com/Skandotai/agentic-ontology-of-work/issues. Reports of work that AOW cannot describe are especially useful. Pull requests change aow.yaml. All other files are generated from it. Guidelines: https://github.com/Skandotai/agentic-ontology-of-work/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md

License

Prose: CC-BY 4.0. Ontology, shapes, schemas, queries, examples, and code: Apache 2.0. Both licenses permit copying, adaptation, and commercial use with attribution to the author and Skan.ai and an indication of changes.

Citation

Whitepaper preprint: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22945754

Concept DOI (latest version): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22945904

Version 2.0.0 DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22945905

Garg, M. (2026). Agentic Ontology of Work (AOW), version 2.0.0. Skan.ai. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22945905