UOR—Universal Object Reference—is an attempt to give digital objects an address that does not collapse their identity into a path or storage provider.
Beyond location
A file path answers where bytes happen to be. A URL identifies a location and protocol. A content hash can identify exact bytes.
Useful objects have more structure than any one of those views. They have types, relationships, versions, permissions, provenance, and semantic neighborhoods.
UOR explores an address space where those properties can be reasoned about without requiring every viewer to know the underlying storage layout.
The topology
The long-term model is a high-dimensional plane of objects and typed relationships:
- content-derived identity
- signed edges between objects
- identity and absence proofs
- epoch-linked audit history
- encrypted and federated storage
- semantic routing that can carry evidence for why a path is valid
A viewer asks for an object. The surrounding system finds and reconstructs the representation appropriate to the viewer’s capabilities.
Why it connects to Hologram
UOR provides the addressing and semantic substrate. Hologram provides a portable object and execution format. A registry can preserve typed relationships and evidence between them.
Together, they explore an Internet that is less dependent on knowing which machine, bucket, or directory currently holds the bytes.