Anthony asked for OpenCar twice after I argued for OpenVehicle on the
grounds that it covered boats. His name is the better one: OpenCar is
what a person reaches for, and a site that lists cars lists the
motorcycle and the pickup beside them.
So rather than keep a name that disagrees with its contents, the scope
moves to match the name. `kind` is now car, motorcycle, truck, van,
suv, bus, rv, atv, other -- road vehicles. Boats and heavy equipment are
dropped from it and belong in sibling profiles, which cost nothing to
add because the parent does not change. Keeping them here would have
meant every field being optional and meaningless for half the subjects.
`subject.type` is `car` and the key is `subject.car`, so the axis value
and the profile agree.
Renamed the day it shipped and before anything reads it: no descriptor
exists yet, and nichedb's directory has not been built. Doing it later
would have meant a migration.
50 contract tests pass, spec-discovery included.
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A house for sale, an apartment to rent, a car. One document per listing,
on the seller's own origin, so a directory reads the seller's file
instead of licensing somebody else's database or scraping a marketplace
that forbids it.
**The name `OpenRental` was the obvious one and it is taken.** It
already means renting OpenAgent and OpenSwarm members through CoinPay,
with a published schema, SDK, validators and fixtures. Its own document
records surviving one collision already: it was OpenFleet until
2026-09-13. Reusing the name for housing would have broken a shipped
0.1 spec, so the family is OpenListing instead.
Two axes rather than a spec per combination. A house for sale and a
house to rent are the same house; only the offer differs. A house for
sale and a car for sale are the same offer; only the subject differs.
Writing OpenHouseForSale, OpenHouseForRent, OpenCarForSale and the rest
produces one spec per cell of a grid, each repeating most of the others.
So `offer.type` carries sale/rent/lease/auction/free/wanted and
`subject.type` carries property/vehicle, and a subject profile adds only
the fields peculiar to its subject. A reader that knows OpenListing but
not a profile still reads price, location, offer and dates correctly.
`openhouse` is not used as a name: in real estate an open house is a
viewing event, not a kind of listing. An actual one is an entry in
`showings`.
The problem section is grounded rather than asserted: RESO tracks 484
separate MLSs as of August 2026, down from nearly twice that in 2015;
each does publish a RESO Web API feed, and each requires a real estate
licence, a signed per-MLS data agreement and vendor credentials. Four
hundred and eighty-four negotiations for one national view, not
redistributable. Vehicle parts are the same shape with different
letters (ACES/VCdb, TecDoc).
Decisions worth naming. Prices are decimal STRINGS, because 2450.10 is
not representable in binary floating point and a listing is a price.
Absent means unstated, never zero -- with `bedrooms: 0` called out in
the property profile as the one place where zero genuinely differs and a
studio is not an unstated bedroom count. `location.precision` lets a
seller publish a postal code rather than a street for an occupied home,
and forbids a reader from drawing a pin on a building anyway. A closed
listing SHOULD stay served for 90 days with `closed_at`, because a
directory that learns from a 404 cannot tell "sold" from "outage" --
the failure that makes every coupon site a graveyard.
The vehicle profile treats a VIN as a claim rather than a proof, points
readers at NHTSA vPIC (free, keyless, public domain) for decoding rather
than making sellers restate what the VIN encodes, and puts parts fitment
explicitly out of scope: that is ACES/VCdb or TecDoc, and a public spec
cannot restate licensed data.
Registered as one parent and two blocks under it, using the registry's
existing `parent` field the way OpenServer's blocks already do. Flat
slugs rather than nested paths because /docs/[slug] is a single dynamic
segment, not a catch-all -- a nested slug would not have routed at all.
nichedb.dev is named as the reference directory.
50 contract tests pass including spec-discovery and page-metadata.
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
