Open Knowledge Format (OKF)

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The Open Knowledge Format (OKF) is a vendor-neutral format published by Google for storing knowledge as plain Markdown files with YAML frontmatter. The goal: knowledge should be produceable and consumable — independent of framework, model provider or serving system. Whether a human, an agent or a script writes it, and whether a static file server, a knowledge UI, an LLM context, a search index or a graph viewer reads it, makes no difference. CompanyWizard’s knowledge base is structurally very close to this format.

What is OKF?

An OKF bundle is simply a directory of Markdown files — no schema registry, no central authority, no required tooling. Each file is one knowledge concept; its identity is its path within the bundle (without the .md suffix). Because these are plain files, they are versionable, diffable and readable by humans and machines alike.

Core principles

Minimally opinionated, freely extensible. OKF requires exactly one mandatory field and allows arbitrary additional fields beyond that. Producers may add whatever they need; consumers must tolerate unknown fields, missing fields and broken links.
Frontmatter only for what’s queryable. The YAML header holds machine-filterable fields (type, resource, tags, timestamp) — the actual prose lives in the body.
Graph-shaped, not just a tree. Concepts reference each other via ordinary Markdown links. The meaning of a relationship lives in the surrounding prose, not in the link itself — creating a connected web of knowledge instead of a rigid folder hierarchy.
Progressive disclosure. An automatically generated index.md per folder serves as the entry and navigation point into the bundle.

The `type` field

type is OKF’s only mandatory field and its central categorisation attribute — a short, self-explanatory string such as note, howto, spec or reference. Consumers use it for filtering and for colour-coding in a graph. The vocabulary is deliberately decentralised: there is no closed list of allowed values.

Why this fits CompanyWizard

Our knowledge base already consists of Markdown plus YAML frontmatter, and its links ([[wikilinks]] or kb: links) resolve at runtime — structurally very close to OKF. That makes CompanyWizard knowledge “OKF-projectable”: it can be turned into a conformant bundle with little effort, one that stays portable across tools. A cheap interoperability lever — your knowledge is not trapped inside the platform.

Distinction: live vault vs. pure export

The live vault additionally carries fields for access control (classification, access_roles — see RBAC & confidentiality levels). Because OKF explicitly tolerates extra fields, the vault remains a valid OKF bundle. The pure OKF export, by contrast, strips these RBAC fields and is thereby provably conformant (“conformant by construction”). What this looks like in practice is covered in the two sister articles.