Two levels of discovery
1
Search the directory
The agent searches a directory for services. The InFlow directory is one directory.
2
Read the service
The agent reads the live ODP document of each service. The document leads to its collections, offerings, and actions.
Terms
Catalog operations
A service declares the catalog operations that it implements. ODP conformance needslist-offerings and get-offering. Search and collections are optional, so an agent must check the advertised operations of each service.
Minimal, Recommended, and Complete are scopes of the guided integration. They are not levels in the ODP specification.
ODP and the InFlow directory
ODP defines how a service shows its offerings. The directory helps agents find services. A directory entry is cached metadata. The live catalog stays on the service.ODP and x402 Bazaar
x402 Bazaar is an x402 extension. It helps agents find x402-enabled endpoints and tools, with their schemas and payment requirements. ODP has a wider scope. It describes what a business offers, independent of how the business authenticates or charges.- “Find a weather API that accepts x402.” Bazaar can be enough.
- “Find GPU rentals, filter by memory and region, compare the hourly rates, and find how to reserve one.” ODP gives one catalog model, so the agent does not learn the custom catalog API of each provider.
How ODP connects to AEP and payments
An action can point to an endpoint that needs enrollment (AEP) or payment (MPP and x402). The InFlow CLI gives the agent all three parts.Use ODP
SDKs and specification
ODP has SDKs for Go, Java, Node.js, Python, and Rust in the offering-protocol organization. The Python package isoffering-protocol on PyPI. It needs Python 3.11 or later. The specification is at offeringprotocol.org.