Open Knowledge Format (OKF)
Google Cloud's open, markdown-based specification for packaging knowledge as directories of concept files cross-linked into a graph — a concrete realization of the knowledge-bundle idea this site describes under Knowledge bundles.
What it is
OKF writes knowledge as a bundle: a directory of UTF-8 markdown files, one concept per file (a table, a metric, an application programming interface, a runbook, or an abstract idea), each carrying a short YAML header and ordinary markdown links to its neighbors. The links turn the directory into a graph. Nothing to install to read it — the bundle is just files, and an agent walks the graph the same way a person follows a link in a wiki.
Google published the format at its Agentic Data Cloud event and ships it inside Google Cloud's Knowledge Catalog, a live product that ingests and serves OKF bundles to agents. The specification is versioned: v0.1 (June 2026) and v0.2 (July 2026), which adds ownership and commitment — who stands behind a concept — to the metadata.
Why it matters for the knowledge layer
OKF is significant to this site because it is the industry's concrete, shipped version of an idea the site argues for in the abstract: knowledge as typed, linked, scoped bundles rather than a flat pile of documents or a proprietary catalog. It lowers the cost of portability — a bundle written by one organization can be consumed by another agent without translation, which is exactly the cross-organizational, vendor-neutral direction the site's standards work points toward.
The format being open and free is useful and is not the whole of the problem. Nothing in OKF keeps the knowledge current, proves a fact, or retires it when it becomes false. Those are the lifecycle, provenance, and deprecation disciplines — the same gap Okf leaves for the owner to fill.
Relationship to this site's conventions
OKF is an instance of the knowledge-bundle shape this site describes, and it connects to the discoverability layer: a bundle with an entry-point file and change history is findable and walkable by an agent without scraping. The site does not own OKF, and the site's conventions are broader — representation, lifecycle, grounding, the agent interface, and discoverability — while OKF supplies one concrete file format for the representation and organization of a bundle.
Consider before adopting
OKF is a young, draft specification. Adopting it means buying into a format that is still versioning (v0.2 as of July 2026) and is shepherded by a single vendor even though the format itself is open. For a team choosing a bundle format, OKF is a strong default to evaluate, but treat the version as a working draft with draft-level guarantees, not a settled standard. (status checked )
FAQ
It is an open specification, at draft status (v0.2 as of July 2026), published by Google Cloud. It is not a standards-body standard like a World Wide Web Consortium Recommendation, though it is versioned and already shipped inside a Google product.
No. OKF is a file-level way of writing knowledge down; you still need storage, query, and governance at scale. The format makes the files portable and readable, not the whole backend.
No. The format supports metadata and change history, but nothing in it enforces freshness. Currentness, provenance, and deprecation remain the owner's job, which is the lifecycle work this site describes.
llms.txt is a single index of a site at a known path. OKF is a bundle of many concept files cross-linked into a graph an agent walks. The two complement each other rather than overlap.
Sources
- Google Cloud, "Introducing the Open Knowledge Format" — the announcement and Design in one screen: a bundle as a directory of markdown concept files with YAML frontmatter, plus the Knowledge Catalog integration. Publisher's own account; vendor-published.
- enterprise-okf-ai — a working pipeline that converts messy documents to an OKF-style bundle and validates it; useful as an implementation reference, not an official source.
- Secondary explainer, mer.vin — an illustrated walkthrough of v0.1 and its relationship to knowledge graphs. Status checked .
Sources checked · page updated .