OpenKOS

Open Knowledge Orchestration System — a local-first engine for the Open Knowledge Format.

OpenKOS turns your scattered text into a living, portable knowledge base your AI agents can actually use — compiled once, kept current, and stored as plain Open Knowledge Format files so it is never locked to any app, model, or vendor.

Project status: alpha. OpenKOS runs: the Compiler and the Graph-and-Memory arcs (MVP 1 and MVP 2) are complete — 19 CLI verbs, hybrid retrieval, and the full forget/purge lifecycle all ship today. The API may still change between releases, but OpenKOS is published and installable now — pip install openkos, see Getting started. Early contributors and feedback are welcome — see Contributing.

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The problem

Your AI assistant forgets everything between sessions, so you re-explain the same context every time and the insights you build together disappear into chat history. Meanwhile your notes pile up in folders nobody keeps current. Two powerful things — your knowledge and your models — sit side by side, disconnected.

Retrieval (RAG) doesn't fix this: it re-reads your raw documents on every question and rediscovers everything from scratch. Nothing accumulates. The cross-references are never drawn, the contradictions never reconciled.

The idea

Instead of retrieving from raw sources every time, an LLM can incrementally build and maintain a persistent, interlinked knowledge base that sits between you and your sources — Andrej Karpathy's LLM Wiki pattern. Knowledge is compiled once and then kept current. It compounds.

In June 2026 Google Cloud published a vendor-neutral specification for that pattern: the Open Knowledge Format (OKF) — a directory of markdown files with YAML frontmatter, portable across any tool. It is young (v0.1, still a draft) but open, minimal, and gaining adoption. Google's framing was: "What's missing is a format, not another service," and they invited the community to build producers and consumers.

OpenKOS is that producer and consumer, built for individuals and running entirely on your machine.

Before / after

	Without OpenKOS	With OpenKOS
Asking your AI about your own notes	It re-reads raw files every time	It answers from a compiled, cited knowledge base
New source	Piles up unread	Compiled into a Source plus typed knowledge objects, each linked to its source
Provenance	"Where did this come from?" is a guess	Every object links back to its immutable source
Facts that change	Old claims quietly rot	Freshness stamps keep the base honest over time
Portability	Trapped in one app	Plain OKF files — open in Obsidian, VS Code, GitHub, anything
Privacy	Your knowledge leaves your machine	Local-first, offline-capable, local models

What it feels like

# point OpenKOS at a folder of text and compile it into an OKF bundle
openkos ingest ./sources

# ask a question and get a cited answer from the compiled knowledge
openkos query "what did I conclude about how to live well?"

# check the base stays honest — stale `as of` stamps and orphan pages
openkos lint

(The full command set — 19 verbs spanning ingest, cited query, the typed graph, entity resolution, volatility tiers (suggest-volatility/set-volatility), and the forget/purge lifecycle — is in docs/cli.md.)

Getting started

Alpha: the commands below run today. OpenKOS is on PyPI — install the released version below, or install from the GitHub repository to track the latest main. The API may still change between releases.

OpenKOS is a local-first command-line tool. You install the engine once, then create a knowledge bundle per knowledge base — much like installing git once and running git init in many repositories.

Prerequisites: Python 3.12+; git; git-filter-repo (only needed for purge); and a local model runtime — Ollama with the chat model (ollama pull qwen3:8b) and the embedding model (ollama pull bge-m3) pulled. No accounts, no API keys: nothing leaves your machine.

Install the engine (once):

uv tool install openkos   # or: pipx install openkos — or: pip install openkos

This installs the openkos command on your PATH. To try it once without a persistent install, run it ephemerally:

uvx openkos --help

Prefer the latest unreleased main? Install from the repository instead — the same command with a git URL:

uv tool install git+https://github.com/jasonssdev/openkos

Create a bundle (per knowledge base):

mkdir ~/knowledge && cd ~/knowledge
openkos init

init scaffolds the workspace — raw/ for your immutable sources and bundle/ for the compiled OKF bundle (starting with just index.md and log.md; concept-type folders are never pre-created, only added as you ingest) — then writes AGENTS.md and, last, the openkos.yaml marker. It refuses without writing anything if the directory already looks like a workspace. Sources sit beside the bundle rather than inside it, so bundle/ stays pure OKF: portable, conformant, and shareable on its own.

Then the loop:

openkos ingest ./meeting-notes.txt   # compile a source into the bundle
openkos query "what did we decide?"  # get a cited answer

See docs/cli.md for the full command reference and docs/user-journey.md for the end-to-end experience.

Philosophy

• Local-first and private by default. Runs on your machine, works offline, built for local models. The cloud is optional, never required.
• Standard-aligned, not bespoke. We adopt OKF rather than invent a format, and adopt its definitions rather than restate them. An open, vendor-neutral specification is the most agnostic choice there is.
• Living knowledge, honest over time. Sources are immutable; concept documents evolve as you learn; fast-changing facts carry freshness stamps so nothing silently becomes a lie.
• The human curates; the engine maintains. You source, explore, and ask. OpenKOS does the bookkeeping — extraction, linking, freshness, indexing.
• Reconstructible and explainable. Every index, embedding, and graph rebuilds from the canonical bundle plus sources. Answers always cite.

How OpenKOS relates to the ecosystem

We build on the shoulders of prior work rather than competing with it:

• Karpathy's LLM Wiki — the seminal pattern. OpenKOS is a concrete engine that instantiates it.
• Open Knowledge Format (Google Cloud) — the standard we store and exchange in. Google's reference stack targets enterprise cloud data (BigQuery); OpenKOS is its local-first, personal counterpart.
• Obsidian-based tools (obsidian-mind, obsidian-second-brain) — excellent, but tied to Obsidian and packaged as prompt/skill conventions. OpenKOS is a standalone, app-agnostic engine whose output is portable OKF.

The wedge, in one line: the local-first, personal producer-consumer-runtime for OKF that nobody else has built.

Roadmap at a glance

OpenKOS ships in three MVP arcs, each usable on its own. Full detail in docs/roadmap.md.

• MVP 1 — The Compiler. (Complete.) The Karpathy loop, locally, over text: ingest → OKF concepts with provenance → cited query → freshness lint. Useful in an afternoon.
• MVP 2 — The Graph and Memory. (Complete.) Entity/relationship extraction and reversible merge, a typed knowledge graph (an OpenKOS layer over OKF's untyped links — other tools still read the bundle fine), hybrid retrieval (lexical FTS5 + local vectors + graph, fused via RRF with PageRank), a fail-closed sensitivity filter (confidential concepts never reach the LLM), reference-aware forget plus an irreversible purge (right-to-be-forgotten), and answers that file back into the base (query --save, the two-output rule).
• MVP 3 — The Runtime and Interoperability. An MCP server and APIs so agents use OpenKOS as durable memory; full OKF import/export with the wider ecosystem.

Beyond that: a desktop app, graph visualization, richer memory, and federation — explored only after the MVPs prove out with real users.

Documentation

• docs/vision.md — vision, philosophy, and positioning
• docs/philosophy.md — the foundational essay: what knowledge is and why OpenKOS matters
• docs/knowledge-object-model.md — how knowledge is represented (OKF + the OpenKOS layer)
• docs/roadmap.md — the MVP roadmap
• docs/tech_stack.md — technology choices
• docs/architecture.md — repository and bundle structure, and source versioning
• docs/okf-alignment.md — how OpenKOS relates to OKF
• docs/glossary.md — definitions of the core vocabulary
• docs/faq.md — frequently asked questions
• docs/user-journey.md — the end-to-end user experience
• docs/testing.md — manual end-to-end testing walkthrough (all 19 commands)
• docs/cli.md — the command-line reference
• docs/brand.md — visual identity: isotype, wordmark, palette, typography
• docs/adr/ — architecture decision records (the log begins with the first code-time decision)

Contributing

OpenKOS is early, which is the best time to shape it. The clearest entry points are the "community can contribute" notes under the current MVP in the roadmap. Please open an issue to discuss anything larger than a small change before sending a PR, so we can make sure it fits and can be merged.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for how to get involved and CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md for community standards. Maintainers: see MAINTAINERS.md for how contributions are reviewed and decided.

License

Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE.