Supporting the Open Knowledge Format

Open Knowledge ships a starter pack named okf that scaffolds a knowledge base conformant with Google's Open Knowledge Format (OKF) from the first commit — without enforcing anything. You get a portable, OKF-ready bundle out of the box, and you stay free to author however you like.

What the pack seeds

Run it with ok seed --pack okf. It scaffolds:

Each of the three content folders (concepts/, references/, notes/) ships its own template, so new docs start with the right type and section skeleton already in place — you never hand-set the frontmatter. The conventions also ship as a project-local skill (open-knowledge-pack-okf) installed alongside the seed, so your agent learns the pack's discipline without a hand-written CLAUDE.md.

Conformance is pre-populated, not enforced

This is the key design decision. OKF asks exactly one thing of every non-reserved document: a non-empty type in its frontmatter. Reserved index.md / log.md stay frontmatter-free, and links are standard markdown.

The pack bakes those habits into the seeded content and documents them — but it changes nothing about how Open Knowledge itself behaves:

• Open Knowledge's native frontmatter schema stays open-shaped.
• Nothing is linted for OKF conformance.

So three habits are all it takes to keep the KB handable to a strict OKF consumer as it grows:

1. Every non-reserved doc carries a non-empty type.
2. index.md / log.md stay lowercase and frontmatter-free.
3. Links use standard markdown ([text](./path.md)).

Open Knowledge also accepts [[wiki-link]] shorthand as a native superset, and the OKF export normalizes it to standard links — but seeded content uses standard links so the bundle is conformant as-is.

Further reading

• Open Knowledge Format spec — the canonical OKF v0.1 specification (Google Cloud).
• STARTER_PACKS registry — canonical source for the okf pack content.
• Karpathy's LLM wiki workflow and Entity vault workflow — other starter-pack-driven workflows in Open Knowledge.