OCDS
OCDS - the Open Contracting Data Standard - is the open schema that every Australian jurisdiction publishes contract notices and awards under. It’s the standard behind AusTender and the state procurement portals, and it structures the pre-award half of Civil Memory: planning notices, open tenders, and awards, before a job becomes yours to deliver.
What it covers in Demiton
OCDS-shaped data is the public record of a contracting process: who’s buying, what’s being tendered, who bid, who won, and at what value. In Civil Memory terms, this is everything on the Market side of the award seam - the part of a job’s life that happens in public, before you win it.
Projection, not storage
Demiton never stores OCDS as its native format. Facts live in their own typed structure internally, and the platform projects them into OCDS shape on ingest - reading a government portal’s release and translating it into the record Civil Memory holds - and again wherever a caller needs OCDS-conformant output. Conformance is something the platform produces at its edges, not something baked permanently into how data is stored.
This is deliberate: it means the internal fact model can evolve, absorb new source systems, and support queries the standard was never designed for, without ever losing the ability to speak OCDS where it matters.
Next steps
- OC4IDS - the delivery-reporting standard that picks up after the award
- Conformance - how conformance is declared and enforced
- How Civil Memory works - the award seam where OCDS hands off to OC4IDS