TL;DR: OCIF v0.7.0 simplifies the format by merging nodes and relations into a single unified concept, adds local coordinate systems for proper nesting, and cleans up extension naming.

Hi everyone,

The Open Canvas Working Group is excited to announce OCIF v0.7.0!

The theme of this release is simplification. As Dave Winer puts it in his rules for standards makers: "One way is better than two" and "fewer format features is better." We've taken that to heart.

What's New

Nodes and Relations Unified — The biggest change: nodes and relations are now a single concept. Edges, groups, and hyperedges are just node extensions in the data array. This removes the ambiguity between the two, simplifies the extension structure, and makes the format easier to reason about. One way is better than two.

Local Coordinate Systems — Node position, size, and rotation are now interpreted relative to the parent node. This enables proper nesting and infinite zoom. A new Global Positions extension lets you cache computed global values when needed.

Parent-Child Built In — Nodes now have a parent property directly. The old parent-child relation extension has been replaced by a simpler Inheritance extension.

Simpler Extension Naming — All extensions now follow @ocif/foo-bar, dropping the old -node and -rel suffixes. Fewer distinctions, less to remember.

Extensions Everywhere — Extensions can now be applied to the canvas, nodes, resources, and representations uniformly.

Plus default values declared in all JSON schemas, a cleaner type hierarchy with Entity/Item base types, and many editorial improvements throughout the spec.

Get Involved

Read the full spec at spec.canvasprotocol.org.

If you have questions or comments, use this discussion.

Share your implementation experiences on the OCWG Discord.

As always, we're looking for implementation feedback, use cases, and suggestions for improvements. Whether you're building a full implementation or just exploring specific features, we'd love to hear from you.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to this release, and especially Max for suggesting and carrying out the nodes/relation unification.

– The OCWG Core team