Introduction

OKForest turns an organization’s knowledge into a governed, AI-ready asset. Teams keep their knowledge as Open Knowledge Format (OKF) bundles in their own Git repositories. OKForest serves that knowledge to AI assistants (Claude, ChatGPT, and other agents) over MCP and to people through a browser, routes every change through an owner’s or steward’s approval, and connects many repositories into one knowledge base.

The Open Knowledge Format

OKF is an open specification from Google for knowledge that both people and AI can read. A bundle is a folder of markdown files, one concept per file, each with YAML frontmatter:

---
type: Policy
title: Refund policy
description: How and when customers can get their money back.
tags: [customers, billing]
status: stable
verified:
  by: human:jane@acme.example
  at: 2026-09-01T00:00:00Z
---
# Refund policy

Customers can return any order within 30 days. See [the returns process](/operations/returns.md).

Concepts link to each other with ordinary markdown links, each directory has an index.md that lists its contents, and log.md records what changed. Version 0.2 adds provenance (sources, generated), trust (verified), lifecycle (status), and freshness (stale_after) to the frontmatter.

OKF defines the files. It deliberately leaves out approval workflows, access control, and anything that spans more than one bundle: that is what OKForest adds. OKForest is independent and not endorsed by Google.

What you can use today

The open-source toolkit is available now, under the Apache 2.0 license:

• OKForest CLI (npx okforest): validate a tree against OKF v0.2 and OKForest’s conventions, list its metadata, and start a new tree.
• OKForest Validate: a GitHub Action that runs the same checks on every pull request.
• Rules: every check, with its severity.

The hosted service, with the MCP server and the browser, is in early access. To try it, email hello@okforest.ai.