Bowdlr

mores.

The inter-agent signal standard — the shared conventions by which AI agents announce what they've done, what changed, and that they're alive.

envelope CloudEvents 1.0 moresversion 1 signal types 9 audience published open standard

01Two planes, one convention

Agent estates need two distinct communication planes, and most conflate them. Plane 1 is governed invocation: an agent calls a tool, policy is evaluated, a response returns. Plane 2 is signalling: an agent announces something — no request, no response, no data transfer. Mores is Plane 2: one lightweight, fire-and-forget schema every agent can speak, and any hub, broker or peer can consume.

Plane 1 · not Mores

Governed invocation

Synchronous request/response through a governance gateway (e.g. ai‑gap). Policy-evaluated, allow/deny, audited.

Plane 2 · Mores

Signalling

Asynchronous, one-way telemetry + coordination: “I refreshed grid‑ef”, “source drift detected”, “I'm online”. Never blocks real work.

Design principle: ride a standard, own the semantics. The envelope is stock CloudEvents 1.0 JSON — brokers and gateways consume Bowdlr signals with zero bespoke tooling. The value is the taxonomy of agent signals, not wire framing.

02The envelope

Every signal is one CloudEvents 1.0 JSON object. Bowdlr adds five extension attributes (all optional except moresversion and principal), named per the CloudEvents extension rules — lowercase alphanumerics, ≤20 chars.

{
  "specversion": "1.0",
  "id": "0b9f2c64-8f1e-4d67-9c1a-7f3b2a9e5d10",
  "source": "mcp://refdata.bowdlr.com/grid-ef",
  "type": "com.bowdlr.refdata.product.refreshed",
  "subject": "grid-ef@v1",
  "time": "2026-06-28T09:14:03Z",
  "datacontenttype": "application/json",
  "dataschema": "https://contracts.bowdlr.com/mores/1/product.refreshed.json",
  "data": { "product": "grid-ef", "version": "v1",
            "source": "EPA eGRID", "rows_changed": 12,
            "digest": "sha256:4f2a…" },

  "moresversion": "1",
  "principal": "svc:refdata-curation",
  "correlationid": "req-7731",
  "sequence": "10432"
}

id is the idempotency key — delivery is at-least-once; consumers dedupe on it.
principal is the emitting service identity, mappable to a governance principal.
correlationid cross-links a signal to a governance event or request on Plane 1.
sequence gives strict per-source ordering; time gives best-effort global order.
signature (optional) is ed25519: + 128-hex Ed25519 over the canonical envelope — the event minus signature, serialised as compact JSON with sorted keys, UTF-8. Unsigned signals are accepted but lower-trust.

03The vocabulary (v1)

Signal types are reverse-DNS, hierarchical, and versioned as a reference-data product (Bowdlr master #38, mores-vocabulary). Bold data fields are required; each type links its JSON Schema wire contract.

Reference-data lifecycle

`com.bowdlr.refdata.product.refreshed`active	A product's data was refreshed from source. data: product, version, source, rows_changed, digest, cadence product.refreshed.json
`com.bowdlr.refdata.product.version.published`active	A new product version was released. data: product, from_version, to_version, changelog_url, breaking product.version.published.json
`com.bowdlr.refdata.source.drift.detected`active	The watcher flagged drift in an upstream source. data: product, source, drift_kind, severity, detail source.drift.detected.json
`com.bowdlr.refdata.source.fetch.failed`active	A source fetch or integrity check failed. data: product, source, error, http_status, retry_at, attempt source.fetch.failed.json
`com.bowdlr.refdata.licence.changed`active	A product's redistribution posture changed. data: product, from_posture, to_posture, redistributable, reason licence.changed.json
`com.bowdlr.refdata.health.status`active	Periodic heartbeat / health of a ref-data surface. data: status, products_ok, products_total, note health.status.json

Agent coordination

`com.bowdlr.agent.presence`active	Agent came online / went offline. data: agent_id, state, surface_uri, capabilities_digest agent.presence.json
`com.bowdlr.agent.status`active	Free-form agent status report. data: agent_id, state, message, metrics agent.status.json
`com.bowdlr.agent.capability.changed`active	An agent's advertised capabilities changed. data: agent_id, added, removed, catalog_uri agent.capability.changed.json

New types are additive (a vocabulary entry + a wire schema). Removing or retyping a field, or changing a type's meaning, is a new major (/mores/2/…).

04Transport & the hub contract

v1 binding is the CloudEvents HTTP structured mode. A hub is anything that accepts:

Request	Response
`POST /mores/v1/signals` `Content-Type: application/cloudevents+json` body = the envelope above	`202 Accepted` — stored
schema violation (envelope or data)	`400` + JSON error
other content type	`415`

Fire-and-forget: emitting never blocks or fails the caller's real work. Emitters buffer + retry; the hub is on nobody's critical path.
At-least-once: consumers dedupe on id. Emitters keep id stable per logical signal.
No payloads: signals carry metadata about data — digests, counts, versions — never the data itself, so they are safe on the observability plane and licence-clean by construction.
A durable bus (NATS / Kafka via the CloudEvents bindings) is a drop-in later; the schema does not change.

05Adopting Mores

Three steps, no SDK required:

Emit — build the CloudEvents object for a vocabulary type and POST it to your hub. Any CloudEvents SDK works.

Validate — run the conformance validator against your emitter's output:

python -m bowdlr_platform.reference_data.mores.conformance signal.json
# or against downloaded artefacts, verifying signatures too:
… conformance --schemas ./mores/1 --vocabulary ./vocabulary.yaml \
              --pubkey <64-hex ed25519 key> signal.json

Discover — the vocabulary is queryable as reference data: the mores-vocabulary master on the Bowdlr refdata MCP/REST surface answers “what signals exist?” with the same file the emitter is driven by.

Wire schemas resolve under contracts.bowdlr.com/mores/1/; the vocabulary master ships as mores-vocabulary@v1.