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Google proposes Open Knowledge Format based on Markdown

69 points by itherseed

by sadschnitzel

3 subcomments

I love the simplicity of this OKF spec, but I'm not sure everything can be represented well in "just Markdown".
I've recently become intrigued by representing concepts so that AI can co-contribute effectively and token-efficiently (typically: find a good way to represent something as semi-structured sequential text), but also without compromising the human lens on the representation. We shouldn't accept a downgrade of the human knowledge representation experience just to make it AI-accessible. That's especially true if traditionally non-dev personas need to contribute, and they almost certainly find "weird text format + git" much worse than their current authoring/viz tools.
I'm excited to see how standards for semantically representing different kinds of knowledge emerge in the next few years!
Successful examples I can think of to mix in are open standards like DBML for schemas/E-R, LikeC4 for architecture, diagrams-as-code ideas like Mermaid, all of which LLMs seem to "get" well (or can be told about from a short EBNF prompt). Crucially, they also have pretty human viz forms, and you can you can just ```code block``` inline them in Markdown next to natural language. And you can get LLMs to help you author the syntax.
Harder to crack is stuff where there's implicit human meaning in spatial layout and colour, like in complex spreadsheets or Miro. I haven't found good alternatives for those yet.
My own attempt in my (data engineering) domain is https://equalexperts.github.io/satsuma-lang/ for AI-and-human source-to-target mappings and transforms. A succinct structured text representation that allows natural language, but also nice viz and LSP/grammar tooling that helps agents not to have to slice and dice big docs token-inefficiently to reason about things like lineage or completeness or undefined sources.

by mrkiouak

0 subcomment

I love revisiting RDF/OWL Semantic Web formats every 10 years.
One of these years will be the one!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

by yladiz

0 subcomment

Having looked at many PDFs that needed to be “translated” to Markdown, it feels like a strange choice - I know it’s primarily to make things easily accessible to AI, but if we’re going to train models anyway, why not train them on something better? Markdown is quite limited, and can’t render something like a nested table for example, and if the point of having “open knowledge” is for AI, why do we need to use a format that won’t really be read by humans?

by port11

0 subcomment

Google has announced… Markdown with YAML front-matter, ladies and gentlemen. Please applause. 15kb of spec for this!
(I’d be less sardonic if we could all stop using oops-you-missed-an-indent-YAML.)

by sermakarevich

0 subcomment

Love the approach. I am a big fun of hierarchical knowledge organization. I think that almost all current Claude abstractions to knowledge management are broken. It becomes visible when you start running many coders concurrently or need to create 1K+ skills fe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48407998

by bsimpson

0 subcomment

Is the flavor of Markdown (e.g. CommonMark) specified? Didn't see anything about it by perusing the first few pages, but that feels important for a spec.

by verdverm

1 subcomments

A bunch of broken (slopped?) links in the original post, here is the repo
https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/knowledge-catalog
Spec: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/knowledge-catalog/blo...

by matthewbarras

0 subcomment

Check out barrasindustries.com/okfind/
Just an idea for an OKF bundle registry

0 subcomment

by glass1122

0 subcomment

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