Spec proposal: OVOS-INTENT-4 — Intent and Entity Registration Bus Contract

[JarbasAl]

Tracking issue for PR #9 — OVOS-INTENT-4: Intent and Entity Registration Bus Contract

A skill today declares its intents over a tangle of legacy bus topics with no single spec. OVOS-INTENT-4 defines a small fixed set of ovos.intent.* / ovos.entity.* / ovos.skill.* topics covering registration, deregistration, enable / disable, and introspection, under an orchestrator-mediated model.

Architectural model

• The orchestrator is the sole bus consumer of skill-originated registration topics and delegates to engines through an orchestrator-internal interface. Engines do not subscribe to the bus topics defined here.
• Atomic registration — keyword intents register in a single message with {required, optional, one_of, excluded} arrays of vocabulary descriptors. No racy multi-message sequences.
• Structured identity — (skill_id, intent_name, lang) triple, not munged strings.
• Skill self-identification on every emission — Message.context["skill_id"] is the emitter, distinct from any data.skill_id (a subject or filter). The orchestrator enforces presence structurally via dispatch-topic stamping and forward/reply inheritance.
• Orchestrator-owned manifest — ovos.intent.list / .describe are answered by the orchestrator; skills carry no introspection obligation.
• No central correlation — producers MUST NOT block waiting on a .response.
• Structured error_code enum on registration .response.

Out of scope

• Dispatch, match-result notification, the handler-lifecycle trio, and utterance-layer end-markers — defined in OVOS-PIPELINE-1.
• Engine-internal matching semantics.