About the Open Knowledge Format (OKF)

What is OKF?

Open Knowledge Format (OKF) is a universal, vendor-neutral format for representing knowledge as plain markdown files with YAML frontmatter. It was launched by Google Cloud Platform and is designed to be authored by people, generated by agents, exchanged across organizations, and consumed by both humans and AI systems.

OKF takes the position that knowledge is best represented in commonly accessible, established formats that are readable by humans without tooling, parseable by agents without bespoke SDKs, diffable in version control, and portable across tools, organizations, and time.

Why OKF Matters

Human & 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

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 & 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.

Composable

Concepts link to each other via normal markdown links, expressing relationships richer than the parent/child hierarchy implied by the directory layout.

Bundle Structure

path/to/bundle/
├── index.md               # Directory listing (optional)
├── log.md                 # Update history (optional)
├── <concept>.md           # A concept document
└── <subdirectory>/
    ├── index.md
    ├── <concept>.md
    └── <subdirectory>/
        └── …

Each concept document has YAML frontmatter with required and optional fields, followed by a markdown body. Concepts can cross-link to each other using standard markdown links.

BundleDex Directory

BundleDex currently tracks 14 bundles across the OKF ecosystem:

  • 5 developer tools and libraries
  • 4 example bundles
  • 100% OKF-conformant

We discover new bundles daily by scanning GitHub, GitLab, and the open web. Each bundle is linked to its original source — we don't host bundle content, we index it.

Agent-Friendly API

BundleDex provides a JSON API endpoint at /api/bundles.json that returns the full bundle index. Agents can use this to discover and load OKF bundles programmatically.

curl https://bundledex.pages.dev/api/bundles.json

Submit a Bundle

Found an OKF bundle that should be listed? Contributions are welcome. The directory is built from automated discovery, but we also accept manual submissions.

For now, reach out via the project's GitHub repository. Automated submission via OKF manifest file is coming in v0.2.

Resources