--- title: Open Knowledge Format (OKF) | daily.dev description: Open Knowledge Format (OKF) is a vendor-neutral specification for representing knowledge as plain markdown files with YAML frontmatter. It is designed to be... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/open-knowledge-format-okf--awkhjc6l6 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Open Knowledge Format (OKF) | daily.dev og:description: Open Knowledge Format (OKF) is a vendor-neutral specification for representing knowledge as plain markdown files with YAML frontmatter. It is designed to be... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/open-knowledge-format-okf--awkhjc6l6 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/AwkHjc6l6.png og:image:alt: Open Knowledge Format (OKF) og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Open Knowledge Format (OKF) **[Anubhav Bhatt](https://daily.dev/sources/piirjq3y7ofa7m8zrpdg8)** · [@anubhavbhatt](https://daily.dev/anubhavbhatt) · 3 min read · 12 upvotes · 2 comments ## Summary Open Knowledge Format (OKF) is a vendor-neutral specification for representing knowledge as plain markdown files with YAML frontmatter. It is designed to be produced by humans, agents, or export pipelines, and consumed by any file server, UI, LLM, or search index. Key properties include version control via git, portability without proprietary APIs, first-class trust and provenance signals in frontmatter, and compatibility with existing markdown-based tools like Obsidian, Notion, and MkDocs. Version 0.2 adds queryable frontmatter fields for source credibility, generation/verification metadata, and staleness tracking to keep agent-maintained knowledge corpora trustworthy. ## Content OKF is a universal, vendor-neutral format for representing knowledge as plain markdown files with YAML frontmatter. It is not tied to any particular agent, framework, model provider, or serving system. The goal is simple: - Anyone can produce OKF — humans authoring by hand, agents built on any framework (Google ADK, LangChain, custom), export pipelines from existing catalogs (Dataplex, Unity Catalog, Collibra, …), or scripts walking a database. - Anyone can serve and consume OKF — a static file server, a knowledge-management UI (Obsidian, Notion, MkDocs), an LLM loading files into context, a search index, or a graph viewer like the one bundled in this repo. ## Why OKF? OKF represents catalog knowledge as plain markdown files with YAML frontmatter, organized in a directory hierarchy. That choice unlocks a few properties that are hard to get from a service-owned metadata store: - Human- and agent-readable. No SDK or query language stands between a reader and the content. An engineer can cat a concept; an LLM can ingest it verbatim into context. - Version-controllable out of the box. Bundles live in git. Pull requests, line-by-line diffs, blame, and review workflows just work — knowledge curation becomes a normal software-engineering activity. - Portable and lock-in free. A bundle is a directory. Ship it as a tarball, host it in any repo, mount it from any filesystem, or sync it to any system that speaks files. No proprietary API stands between you and your metadata. - Mixes structured and unstructured data deliberately. Use frontmatter for the few fields you want to query, filter, or index on (type, resource, tags, generated, status); use the markdown body for the prose, schemas, and example queries that LLMs and humans actually read. - Trust, provenance, and freshness are first-class. v0.2 puts queryable signals in frontmatter — where a concept came from (sources with per-source credibility signals), who produced and confirmed it (generated, verified, from which consumers derive a trust tier), and whether it is still current (status, stale_after) — so an agent-maintained corpus stays trustable without any bespoke runtime. - Minimally opinionated, freely extensible. A small set of required keys ensures interoperability, but bundles can carry arbitrary extra frontmatter keys and arbitrary body sections without breaking consumers. - Composes with existing tooling. Many knowledge tools — Notion, Obsidian, MkDocs, Hugo, Jekyll — already speak markdown plus YAML frontmatter, so bundles can be browsed, edited, or rendered without custom UI. - Progressive disclosure built in. Auto-generated index.md files let an agent or human navigate the hierarchy one level at a time instead of loading the entire bundle into context. - Graph-shaped, not just tree-shaped. Concepts link to each other via normal markdown links, expressing relationships richer than the parent/child implied by the directory layout. ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Using OKF to provide long term context to your agent](https://daily.dev/posts/using-okf-to-provide-long-term-context-to-your-agent-9rqtpfok6) · iO tech\_hub · 10 upvotes · 0 comments - [How the Open Knowledge Format can improve data sharing](https://daily.dev/posts/how-the-open-knowledge-format-can-improve-data-sharing-qqswihmau) · Google Cloud · 15 upvotes · 0 comments - [Knowledge as Code: The Memory File Just Got a Spec](https://daily.dev/posts/knowledge-as-code-the-memory-file-just-got-a-spec-rlawyv7rd) · Pulumi · 2 upvotes · 0 comments - [Architecture as Code: How Google’s OKF Makes Coding Agents Follow Your Architecture](https://daily.dev/posts/architecture-as-code-how-google-s-okf-makes-coding-agents-follow-your-architecture-cc2o3991u) · Medium · 2 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm), [#productivity](https://daily.dev/tags/productivity), [#version-control](https://daily.dev/tags/version-control), [#markdown](https://daily.dev/tags/markdown) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/open-knowledge-format-okf--awkhjc6l6) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"DiscussionForumPosting","mainEntityOfPage":"https://daily.dev/posts/open-knowledge-format-okf--awkhjc6l6","headline":"Open Knowledge Format (OKF)","text":"Open Knowledge Format (OKF) is a vendor-neutral specification for representing knowledge as plain markdown files with YAML frontmatter. 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