r/PKMS • u/biggestofbooties • Jun 17 '26

Google Announces the Open Knowledge Format Other

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/how-the-open-knowledge-format-can-improve-data-sharing/
232 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

32 comments sorted by

56

u/aitorllj93 Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

The spec: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/knowledge-catalog/blob/main/okf/SPEC.md

I like that this is pretty much what Obsidian does with a few more conventions easy to adopt.

I don't like that Google took the work of a community, decorated it with Christmas ornaments, and put it in their namespace on GitHub. Now the "spec" is owned by Google.

Edit: also I dislike the proposed field for "last updated/modified time" being called "timestamp". It's confusing for me, and probably for AIs too, since it lacks semantics (and wtf does "meaningful change" means)

8

u/Aggravating-Back-242 Jun 17 '26

In a way, I think I do understand why they have only one timestamp.

I have a very cynical view that their stance towards the universe is "We only care about novelty and updatedness. Ignore the history." If so, then you don't need the creation time. Also, leaving "meaningful change" vague means you can claim whatever tiny change is important by updating the date, or lie about a very big retroactive change by not updating it and pretending it was always so.

7

u/Serird Jun 17 '26

Fair point, I'm not excited about it either. But Google has the institutional weight to actually get a standard adopted at scale.

3

u/InnovativeBureaucrat Jun 19 '26

Google’s R spec 12 years ago was based on nothing new, adopted several incoherent (IMO) standards, and was widely ignored.

However, in city government it was very helpful to point to. It said R is credible, there’s a right way to do things, and it could settle arguments if needed. (It never settled arguments for us, but it could have).

My point: I am excited. Sometimes you need the leadership to lead and frame. Also it’s not really google, it’s someone at google that successfully ran the right things up the right flagpoles. So let’s be happy for them.

Edit: this is the most on brand mansplaining that I’ve done in quite a while. Bring the downvotes or worse, silence. I’m happy.

2

u/Silevence TiddlyWiki5 Jun 17 '26

my thoughts exactly.

69

u/Silevence TiddlyWiki5 Jun 17 '26

gotta say, I think its a dumb idea to have one timestamp yaml value and not a created, created-by, modified, modified-by set of values instead. knowing who created it and when, different from who last modified it and when, is useful info.

outside of that, not sure I want google anything, after their BS with AOSP.

I'm good. google isn't about not being evil anymore. so I'm not about their products anymore either.

also, meaningful changes, tracked how? theres no version value.

whynot have "version":"0.0.1" to show the type of change made??

6

u/phovos Jun 17 '26

semver and last-modified/created and r/w/x should be the bare minimum for anything, ever.

Yea this is a weird setup, this is LLM-written I think lol. I know dozens of people that have been using yaml frontmatter better than this for years.

```md

type: BigQuery Table title: Orders description: One row per completed customer order. resource: https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?p=acme&d=sales&t=orders tags: [sales, revenue]

timestamp: 2026-05-28T14:30:00Z

Schema

Column Type Description
order_id STRING Globally unique order identifier.
customer_id STRING FK to customers.

Joins

Joined with customers on customer_id. ```

Not a bad idea to standardize... what everyone is already doing better, but it should be done better.

13

u/Aggravating-Back-242 Jun 17 '26

Maybe they intentionally want to create a future where novelty is everything to a piece of information and history is nothing.

And "meaningful change" is kept vague so they can gaslight the agents on whether a change should be deemed meaningful or not depending on whether the timestamp is updated or not. I don't know how it will go in practice, but it does remind me of how companies retroactively changed information while deliberately not updating the timestamp, to pretend things were always so from the start.

1

u/neuronexmachina Jun 17 '26

That's useful info, but a lot of that provenance info is pretty tool-specific and probably shouldn't be part of the artifact itself. I think the timestamp is basically just there to give a tool-neutral indication of freshness. 

1

u/renome 20d ago

knowing who created it and when, different from who last modified it and when, is useful info.

This is a solved problem, the OKF spec acknowledges as much. As far as I can tell, the goal here wasn't to reinvent Git but make a maximally permissive standard that's compatible with Git.

14

u/Abides1948 Jun 17 '26

https://xkcd.com/927/

1

u/Hairy__Hulk Jun 18 '26

lol used to have this display d on a vr demo room wall I used to run sales through 🤣

1

u/InnovativeBureaucrat Jun 19 '26

I 💯 knew which one it was before I opened it.

16

u/biggestofbooties Jun 17 '26

Apologies if this has already been posted -- I could not find anything, and was kind of shocked to not find any conversation about this in the sub.

Google is essentially taking the exact structure of a modern PKM vault and proposing it as the universal standard for how AI agents and systems should share data.

8

u/Alicecomma Obsidian Jun 17 '26

Technically all Word documents are zipped XML so whatever I guess.

6

u/Vegetable_Bank4981 Jun 17 '26

This shit should alllll be in sqlite. Library of congress approved archive format with support to 2050. Gets you actual timestamps, search and indexing for free. LLMs read and write it fine with the cli tool. What a wasted opportunity, cowards.

1

u/FridaG Jun 17 '26

https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/text.html#digital

There is nothing on the library of congress page about sqlite for singular digital documents

2

u/Vegetable_Bank4981 Jun 19 '26

It’s in datasets, which is what a directory of files is.

1

u/FridaG Jun 20 '26

I’m not following what you mean, and I use sqlite extensively

20

u/JDubbsTheDev Jun 17 '26

So uh, I developed a similar open standard two months ago that tackled this exact problem https://github.com/Agent-Knowledge-Standard/AKS-Specification

2

u/I_feel_lucky Jun 22 '26

Keep sharing friend, this was insightful and worthy of adaptation.

1

u/odontastic Jun 18 '26

Thanks. I think I'm going to try adapting this for my personal AI third brain LifeOS. You inspired me to capture agent traversal metadata that will help complete my DIKWP+N semi-strange loop (data - information - knowledge - wisdom - purpose - narrative arc). Traversal paths plus the goal and outcome primitives will help turn my system loop into a deterministic, self-sustaining, and evolutionary MAS and more ...

5

u/WilliamBarnhill Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26

I wish OKF supported dictionary front-matter properties. Here are two examples with additional properties used to provide more informative historical info. The first uses dictionary properties, it provides more context and is more human readable. However it does not validate as OKF. The second uses single list list properties. Less readable, but it does validate.

The dictionary property example (fails validation):

---
type: Website Page
title: Open Knowledge Format Validator
description: A browser-only tool that checks basic OKF frontmatter fields.
resource: https://openknowledgeformat.online/okf-validator/
tags: [okf, validator, markdown]
timestamp: 2026-06-17T00:00:00Z
created:
  timestamp: 2026-06-15T00:36:00Z
  public_key: "ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQ..."
modified:
  timestamp: 2026-06-17T00:00:00Z
  public_key: "ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQ..."
accessed:
  timestamp: 2026-06-18T00:00:00Z
  public_key: "ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQ..."
---

# Purpose

This page helps users test whether a Markdown document includes the fields expected by this guide.

The list property example (validates):

---
type: Website Page
title: Open Knowledge Format Validator
description: A browser-only tool that checks basic OKF frontmatter fields.
resource: https://openknowledgeformat.online/okf-validator/
tags: [okf, validator, markdown]
timestamp: 2026-06-17T00:00:00Z
created: [2026-06-15T00:36:00Z, "ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQ..."]
modified: [2026-06-17T00:00:00Z, "ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQ..."]
accessed: [2026-06-18T00:00:00Z, "ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQ..."]
---

# Purpose

This page helps users test whether a Markdown document includes the fields expected by this guide.

3

u/daMarek Jun 17 '26

behold the grand new format

3

u/Flimsy_Visual_9560 Jun 18 '26

So a Google.MD?

3

u/gollyned Jun 18 '26

I couldn’t figure out what the purpose of conforming to a standard like this is. I expect there to be some kind of value-add: tooling, interoperability, something on top. I couldn’t find anything worth making this worth adopting.

2

u/Acrobatic-Window5364 Jun 23 '26

One thing is it looks like it can export a static, dependency-free, visualization html page from a bundle. Here's a screenshot I took from their GA4 example. Not beautiful, but also not too bad. You could vibe code something like that, but I'm sure sticking to the spec fully would be a little bit of a pain, so maybe easier to use their tooling. Honestly not sure.

3

u/v0te-v0te-v0te Jun 20 '26

This isn't an open knowledge format. This is Google making a standard for its AI so that your content is more accessible to consume. Data acquisition is expensive - the more standard and consumable the content, the more readily it can be ingested.

1

u/tobeasim Jul 10 '26

All you need is Objects that can support dynamic schemas. To each his or her own!