UMMINEX
Universal Market Matching Information Exchange
An open language for offers, requests, and the conditions under which they fit together.
UMMINEX makes Market Intents machine-readable so that different systems can understand what is offered, requested, and actually needed.
A concrete market problem
A refrigerated truck is standing unused in a depot on Thursday evening.
Twenty-two kilometres away, someone is looking for exactly such a vehicle for that evening and would pay for it.
They may still never find each other.
Not necessarily because the information is absent. Both may even be public online. But they are not expressed in a common form in which a machine can reliably recognise: these fit together.
Offer and demand do not necessarily lack. A common language does.
What is UMMINEX?
People and organisations do not simply look for “data”. They want to buy, sell, rent, let, book, offer, procure, deliver, exchange, work, commission, provide, or use something.
We call such a market intention a Market Intent. UMMINEX provides a shared machine-readable language for expressing these Market Intents and their conditions.
A Market Intent is more than an object. Relevant aspects can include:
Not every detail needs to be known already. UMMINEX can treat missing or unresolved information as such. Unknown does not mean: no match.
Offer and demand
Offer
“800 aluminium housings per month available from March.”
Request
“Wanted: 800 to 1,000 aluminium housings per month from March.”
It is not always enough to check whether an offer satisfies a requester. The offerer’s conditions may also need to be met: minimum quantity, delivery area, period, payment method, admissibility, or availability.
UMMINEX therefore describes more than objects or listings. It describes Market Intents and the conditions under which different sides can be compatible.
More than product data
Product information
Market Intent
UMMINEX does not describe things alone. It describes the conditions under which something fits together.
Different markets
Hotel
“Double room from 12 to 15 October, dog allowed.”
Doctor’s appointment
“Available appointment Tuesday between 9 and 12.”
Job
“Qualified care professional, at least 25 hours, no more than 20 kilometres away.”
Industry
“800 to 1,000 aluminium housings per month from March.”
Transport
“Two pallets from Lübeck to Munich by Friday.”
Exchange
“Machine use in exchange for maintenance work.”
The objects differ. The basic questions are similar: who wants what, when, where, in what quantity, under which conditions, and in exchange for what?
Open market intermediation
Digital platforms have solved a real problem. They collect information, standardise it, make it searchable, and bring market participants together. That is valuable intermediation.
A structural dependency can arise where discoverability is possible only when market information is maintained exclusively, or effectively necessarily, in one central system. This can mean repeated data entry, dependency on access rules and ranking, or a harder change of intermediary.
Intermediation is valuable. But the intermediary does not have to own the market.
UMMINEX is not intended to abolish intermediation. Search services, platforms, AI assistants, databases, directories, and specialised matching services can continue to offer valuable services. The shared layer of understanding should be open.
Open digital markets
The technical problem behind UMMINEX has an economic consequence. To be found digitally today, people often maintain offers and availability where many requesters already search: on platforms, marketplaces, and specialised portals.
These services create real value. They collect information, make it comparable, and bring market participants together. A dependency can arise where discoverability and market access are inseparable from the data stock of one intermediary.
UMMINEX takes a different approach.
The intermediary does not have to control access to market data at the same time.
maintains the authoritative information.
describes meaning in a shared open form.
can make information discoverable.
can compare Market Intents and conditions.
can make complex search manageable for people.
can provide convenience, advice, verification, trust, transactions, or other services.
None of these layers necessarily has to control all the others. Platforms, search services, and intermediaries can continue to offer valuable services and charge for them.
Intermediation remains valuable. Dependency does not have to.
Competition and choice
A functioning and widely used UMMINEX could reduce structural dependencies on individual platforms. When offers and requests are published in an open form and processed by different services, possession of one central database is less likely to become the only gateway to a market.
UMMINEX does not dissolve network effects, brands, trust, reach, capital, ratings, computing capacity, or service quality. Open data structures are not a claim to eliminate market power.
UMMINEX vision: discoverability should not conceptually depend on one platform being the exclusive location of a participant's market information.
Europe and digital autonomy
Across different policy and legal frameworks, the European Union pursues goals such as interoperability, better usability of data, control for data holders, fair and contestable digital markets, and open digital ecosystems.
UMMINEX architecture and licensing principles have conceptual parallels with these goals. This is a UMMINEX interpretation of those goals – not EU endorsement, certification, or a claim that UMMINEX is an EU project or an implementation of the Digital Markets Act.
One response to dependencies on large platforms could be to build comparable central platforms. Open standards allow a different thesis: many companies, public institutions, open-source projects, and commercial providers can compete on the same layer of understanding.
Sovereignty can also arise because fewer gatekeepers are needed.
UMMINEX is not a European protectionist standard. It is intended to be usable worldwide. Europe could benefit especially from such infrastructure because open standards, interoperability, data control, and open source are among goals formulated by EU institutions.
Open source
UMMINEX was originally developed by factsoft AG. But UMMINEX is not intended to remain proprietary technology of factsoft AG.
UMMINEX is publicly available under the Apache License 2.0. Separately licensed components remain separately identified. The license applying to UMMINEX and the public repository are available on GitHub.
Apache License 2.0
We did not develop UMMINEX to operate the next central marketplace ourselves. In our view, a shared language for digital markets should be open infrastructure.
Others should be able to build on it, develop better implementations and commercial services, criticise UMMINEX, and develop it further. License conditions still apply.
The Apache License 2.0 includes conditions, in particular for license notices, modifications, and redistribution. Only the full license text is controlling.
UMMINEX – originally developed by factsoft AG, Munich, Germany, 2026.
View the Apache License 2.0 for UMMINEX
UMMINEX should not belong to us. It should work.
Open licensing is only the first step. An open standard becomes genuinely independent only when others can understand, implement, criticise, and develop it further.
Implement. Test. Disprove. Improve.
A simple example
Several hotels publish current availability at their respective sources. A tourist office or private travel service can collect this information and bring it together on its own website.
Available this evening
Hotels do not necessarily have to maintain availability manually in that particular regional system as well. The authoritative information can be taken from their respective source. How individual services publish, find, update, or compare information remains a task of their respective implementations.
Everyday information
Information often already exists. The challenge is its precise meaning: for which time does it apply, which exception applies, which quantity is available, and which conditions belong to it?
Natural language
“I am looking for a holiday job in Lübeck for my 17-year-old son, preferably in August, for exactly one week.”
“I understand: a holiday job is sought for a 17-year-old in Lübeck. The work should take place in August and last exactly one week.”
People increasingly use systems to describe their goal in natural language. AI can support the translation between natural language and structured meaning. UMMINEX itself is not AI.
AI can infer meaning. UMMINEX makes meaning explicit and verifiable.
Architecture principle
Email works globally not because one company manages every message. Different providers and systems can communicate because they use shared open procedures.
UMMINEX follows a related principle for market information: different operators, different software, different databases, different storage locations – and one shared layer of understanding.
This is an analogy of architecture and competition. UMMINEX is not technically an email protocol.
Boundaries
UMMINEX is not one individual intermediation interface.
UMMINEX is not itself the search service.
UMMINEX is an open layer of understanding, not AI.
UMMINEX does not prescribe one single intermediary.
UMMINEX is an open layer of understanding for Market Intents.
Open standard
Offers and requests can be described together with their conditions.
Formal structures can be checked against defined rules.
Missing information does not automatically become a negative statement.
Time, quantities, roles, geography, consideration, alternatives, and resources can be structured.
For developers
Developers can use UMMINEX to create, validate, exchange, and further process structured market information. View source and specification on GitHub.
About UMMINEX
UMMINEX was initiated and originally developed by factsoft ag in 2026. factsoft ag currently operates umminex.org and carries the organisational responsibility for this website and the current project phase.
UMMINEX is not intended to be a proprietary product whose use or further development permanently depends on factsoft ag. The published material is available under the Apache License 2.0 for factsoft-controlled project material.
Today
Initiator, original development, website operation, and current organisational responsibility.
Already open
The published material may be used, implemented, modified, and redistributed, subject to the license terms.
Next step
Independent implementations, critical review, counterexamples, and a long-term governance structure.
An open standard should not depend on a single company in the long term – not even on its original developer. UMMINEX should gradually move toward an open and independent governance structure.
Its long-term form has not been decided. Community governance, an independent technical body, an association, an organisation, a foundation, or another suitable open structure are possible models, not decisions already made.
UMMINEX was initiated by factsoft ag. The standard should be able to develop independently from individual companies over time.
Engineering reality
UMMINEX is not a finished product. The semantic core of the standard is well developed and has been examined with systematic tests. Many difficult cases – from time and quantities to alternatives, resources, and multi-party relationships – can be formally represented and deterministically checked within defined test scopes.
That is not the same as proving that UMMINEX can already express every conceivable Market Intent completely and unambiguously. The next phase of the project begins at exactly that boundary.
The reviewed public release candidate is published on GitHub. The published state was verified again from a fresh clone after publication: the approved public test suite passed 18/18, and the canonical content matched the sealed RC1. This test evidence is not a universality proof.
Specified
The formal core covers, among other things, actors and roles, offers and requests, quantities, time, geography, admissibility, consideration, preferences, alternatives, resources, multiple parties, evidence, UNKNOWN, conditions, matching, and global feasibility. These are examples, not a complete normative list.
Strongly tested
Test families examine individual constructs, combinations, Validator, Builder, and Matcher behavior, resources, alternatives, time, multiple parties, cross-root relationships, evidence resolution, UNKNOWN, and controlled roundtrips. Found errors led to reproducible repairs and regression tests.
Still open
Broader encoder coverage, some Matcher handoffs, natural language, independent implementations, real-world pilots, discovery, indexing, updates, and scaling need further evidence and practical experience.
UMMINEX separates the description of meaning from its later evaluation. Structured Market Intents can be formally validated; matching is intended to rely on explicit conditions. UNKNOWN ≠ NO_MATCH.
UMMINEX already has technical governance rules for Authority, versioning, and changes. Long-term independent institutional governance remains an open project task. Decision-making, evaluation of changes, maintainer structure, different implementations, conflict resolution, succession, institutional stewardship, and protection of the standard's openness still need to be developed.
Test evidence and proof
The semantic core, validation, and matching have been examined systematically and with counterexamples in defined scopes. Numerous different constructs have been tested not only in isolation but also in combination.
Very strong test evidence is not a universality proof.
There is no mathematical proof that every conceivable Market Intent can be represented. Nor is it proven that arbitrary natural language can generally be translated into UMMINEX without loss and reconstructed exactly.
Perfect AI interpretation, complete worldwide discovery, and a finished global ecosystem are not claimed either.
People formulate incompletely, contextually, and ambiguously. Practical systems must identify what is certainly meant, what follows from context, which interpretations differ materially, and when a question is justified.
Encoders, controlled test systems, and extensive experiments exist. General translation of arbitrary natural language into UMMINEX is not yet solved reliably. Technical roundtrips in controlled settings are not automatically natural-language semantic roundtrips.
Open work
Publication and Discovery have specified foundations. A worldwide discovery, indexing, and update ecosystem has not yet been built. Practical experiments with publication, discovery, caching, change detection, distribution, and scaling are needed.
Different technical terms, classifications, and schemas need to be related. Further work includes equivalence, similarity, broader and narrower terms, mapping uncertainty, and domain testing.
Multiple parties, scarce resources, alternatives, and dependent conditions can concern an entire possible allocation. Concepts and implementations exist for these cases and need more counterexamples and application scenarios.
Artificial test cases are not enough. Pilot projects are needed in commerce, industry, services, tourism, appointments, jobs, care, transport, municipal offers, and capacity allocation.
Community
An open standard cannot be defined, tested, and interpreted by a single development team indefinitely. We are looking for people and organisations who will try to disprove UMMINEX, implement it, and test it against real problems.
Bring real Market Intents and, especially, valuable counterexamples.
Develop independent Validators, Encoders, Decoders, Matchers, Resolvers, indexes, or tools.
Examine text → UMMINEX → text, including additional languages.
Experiment with publication, discovery, indexing, caching, and updates.
Search for cases where MATCH, NO_MATCH, or UNKNOWN could be treated incorrectly.
Improve examples, translations, tutorials, and interoperability with existing systems.
Finding a realistic Market Intent that cannot be expressed correctly with current semantics helps the project. Counterexamples, edge cases, ambiguities, contradictions, unexpected combinations, and implementation differences are explicitly welcome.
Help build it. Or try to disprove UMMINEX.
The public repository provides source and specification for independent inspection. For contact: contact@umminex.org.
UMMINEX
UMMINEX does not create a new central marketplace. It creates a shared language on which different providers, requesters, search services, databases, platforms, and AI assistants can build.
Intermediaries can continue to intermediate. Databases can continue to collect data. Platforms can continue to offer convenient services. But the shared layer of understanding can be open.
Be found without giving up control.