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 after years away, and realized I could no longer explain where I lived.
After a long stay abroad, I returned to Guinea in 2018 for a short visit. I had known these streets since childhood, yet I could barely direct a taxi to my own neighbourhood, tell a courier where to drop a package, or describe to a friend where to meet. No street names, no numbers, only landmarks, and landmarks fade.
I came back for good in 2023, and the same friction met me every day. To visit someone, they had to come and meet me halfway: there was no simple way to say where they lived. To order something, I would often just give up: it was faster to fetch it myself than to spend minutes on the phone describing my location. After so long away, I sometimes no longer even knew what locals called a place, or how best to point to it.
These were things I had taken completely for granted abroad. Back home, even as a literate, tech-savvy person, the simplest errands were far harder than they should be. And the contradiction was everywhere: everyone had a smartphone, GPS passed overhead, maps showed every road, and still, four billion of us had no address.
The right solution simply did not exist. So I set out to build one. Ever since, in the evenings and on weekends, I implemented and discarded one approach after another (grids, hashes, word schemes), testing each against the realities of low literacy, no connectivity, and real administrative structure, until the design became OGLAP.
A short return home after years abroad. Getting lost in my own city planted the question.
Returned to Guinea permanently, and met daily by the same difficulty, even as a literate, tech-savvy person.
Every spare hour spent implementing and testing one approach after another, until the right one.
The protocol reaches production, open to all, under MIT + Attribution.
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.