OGLAP is an open protocol from Guinee IO, engineered to give every household, structure, and point of interest a verifiable address, even where there is no street name and no signal.
Make addressing public infrastructure: open, sovereign, and accessible to everyone.
Four billion people live without a formal address. This is not an administrative detail: without an address you cannot receive mail, direct an ambulance to the right place, open an account, or have where you live formally recognized. The deficit is concentrated where connectivity and resources are scarcest.
Existing systems treat the Earth as a uniform grid, disconnected from the structures that actually govern territories. OGLAP takes the opposite stance: anchor every code in a country's real administrative hierarchy, work entirely offline, and remain freely governable by the states and communities that adopt it.
I came home to streets I knew by heart, and discovered I could not give my own address.
After years abroad, I returned to Guinea in 2018 for what was supposed to be a short visit. The city was familiar: the roads, the corners, the neighbourhoods I had known since childhood. But when I needed to guide a taxi, direct a courier, or tell a friend where to meet me, familiarity was not enough. There were no reliable street names, no house numbers, no shared address to say aloud. There were only landmarks, and landmarks can disappear, change names, or mean different things to different people.
When I moved back permanently in 2023, that inconvenience became a daily constraint. Visiting someone often meant they had to come and meet me halfway, because their home could not be described with one simple, durable reference. Ordering a delivery could take longer than fetching it myself. And after years away, I sometimes did not know the local name people now used for a place, or the route description that would make sense to them.
Abroad, I had almost never thought about addresses; they were invisible infrastructure. In Guinea, their absence touched everything: errands, deliveries, emergency response, public services, dignity. The contradiction was impossible to ignore. Smartphones were everywhere. Satellites could locate us within meters. Digital maps showed the roads. And yet billions of people around the world, including people in my own country, still could not point to a stable, readable address they could share.
So I began building the thing I wished existed. Nights and weekends became a long cycle of prototypes and rejection: grids, hashes, word schemes, coordinates, many ideas that worked on paper and failed against real life. OGLAP emerged only after testing every design against the conditions that mattered most: basic literacy, offline use, administrative reality, national sovereignty, and a code ordinary people could actually read, say, and remember.
A short return to Guinea made the problem personal: I knew the city, but could not give a usable address.
After returning permanently, the inconvenience became daily life: visits, deliveries, and simple errands still depended on improvised directions.
Nights and weekends spent building, testing, and discarding designs until the protocol matched real-world constraints.
OGLAP enters production as an open protocol under MIT + Attribution, ready for adoption, audit, and extension.
MIT + Attribution. No lock-in, no licensing fees, no black box. The code and data can be inspected, audited, and adapted by anyone.
Data and logic run locally. Institutions keep control of their dataset and the system's evolution, with no dependency on a foreign entity.
Short, readable, memorable segments designed to work for people with basic literacy, not only for machines.
Guinea's administrative hierarchy (regions, prefectures, sub-prefectures, communes, and quartiers) serves as the reference model for the protocol, from national level down to the quartier.
Any country can be supported by preparing three JSON configuration files; the encoding engine stays unchanged.
Status: ProductionAuthor of the OGLAP protocol specification and designer of the dual-format addressing model.
Contributor to the protocol and the reference implementations.
The organization that publishes and governs OGLAP and its reference SDKs, under an open license.
OGLAP will remain freely usable, modifiable, and redistributable. No entity can enclose it in a proprietary frame. Attribution preserves traceability of the protocol's origin.
Development happens in the open on public repositories. Institutions, researchers, and developers are invited to audit, propose improvements, and contribute.
Whether you are an institution evaluating sovereign addressing, a researcher, or a developer, the repositories and specification are open.