Open Knowledge Format (OKF)

A lightweight open standard from Google Cloud (the GoogleCloudPlatform/knowledge-catalog repo) for representing knowledge and metadata as a directory of markdown files with YAML frontmatter — human-readable, agent-parseable, and git-diffable. It is, almost line for line, a vendor-published specification of the llm-wiki substrate this wiki runs on.

The format

• Bundle — a self-contained collection of concepts, shipped as a directory, a git repo, or an archive. (This wiki’s raw/+wiki/ tree is a bundle.)
• Concept — one markdown file per thing, whether a concrete asset (a BigQuery table, an API endpoint) or an abstract idea (a metric, a playbook). The concept ID is the file path minus .md (e.g. tables/users).
• Frontmatter — a required type field naming the concept category, plus recommended title, description, resource (a canonical URI), tags, and timestamp. The body is free-form markdown with conventional sections like Schema, Examples, Citations.
• Reserved filenames — only index.md (directory listing) and log.md (update history) carry defined meaning. The same two spine files this wiki keeps.
• Cross-linking — plain markdown links join concepts; bundle-relative absolute links (leading /) are recommended.

The deliberate omissions are the point

OKF refuses to prescribe a taxonomy, an ontology, central schema registration, or storage/query infrastructure. type values are producer-defined and unregistered (“BigQuery Table,” “Playbook”). Relationships emerge from the surrounding prose, not from formal link semantics — there is no typed edge, no triple, no RDF. It explicitly does not replace schema systems like Avro, Protobuf, or OpenAPI; it references them. Google frames the whole thing as “metadata as code” — catalog metadata living beside source code in git rather than in a separate registry.

Why it matters here

This is the strongest corroboration yet that the wiki’s core bet is a real attractor, not one author’s taste. Counting Karpathy’s spec, gbrain‘s schema packs, tana‘s supertags, Notion’s databases, and this wiki’s own schema.org @type model, OKF is the fifth independent arrival at typed markdown pages a machine reads — and the first published by a hyperscaler as a named open standard. The substrate convergence the synthesis tracks (Bush’s microfilm desk → a git repo of markdown) now has Google Cloud writing down the file format.

It also sharpens a standing boundary. OKF sits at the anti-formalist pole of knowledge representation: where the semantic-web tradition (RDF/OWL/SHACL — the sibling knowledge-representation wiki) makes relationships machine-checkable triples, OKF leaves them as prose for an LLM to read, betting that a capable model plus minimal structure beats a rigid ontology. That is the same “connection emerges, don’t pre-impose categories” instinct behind Luhmann’s slip-box and associative-trails, now a design principle for an enterprise data catalog. It is the typed-edge question answered the other way: OKF declines the formal edge on purpose.

Finally it adds a third hyperscaler/vendor data point to the enterprise knowledge-substrate thread — alongside Atlan’s context layer and Microsoft’s Knowledge-as-a-Service — but from the opposite direction: where those are managed services that hide the substrate, OKF is a plain-files format you own and diff, the llm-wiki/own-your-markdown ethos brought to corporate metadata. The agent-readable angle makes it a near neighbor of model-context-protocol (a way to deliver this knowledge to an agent).

Caveats

A specification, not a deployment — there’s no adoption data here, and knowledge-catalog is a young repo. The spec is primary and authoritative (T1) for what OKF is; whether it gets used is unproven.

Related

llm-wiki · llm-wiki-gist · knowledge-graph · ontology · tools-for-thought · enterprise-context-layer · azure-logic-apps-knowledge-service · model-context-protocol · gbrain · zettelkasten · google