Man sieht nur, was man weiß.
We see only what we know.
— GoetheYou see that the sun rises and sets and therefore you think you know. You don't.
You only know when you can answer the question: How or what for?
— BarenboimAn AI knows only what we tell it.
KP:1 is for telling it whole.
— KP:1
A plain-text format for packaging epistemic state -- claims with confidence, evidence, relationships, and contradictions.
Editor: Timothy Kompanchenko
Status: Editor's Draft — KP:1 Public Draft — 2026-04 (v0.7-preview)
See also: spec/CORE.md, spec/SPEC.md, GOVERNANCE.md, CONTRIBUTING.md
Knowledge Packs represent what someone believes, how strongly they believe it, based on what evidence, in tension with what other beliefs, as understood at a particular moment in time. KP:1 encodes these properties in Markdown files that are readable by humans and parseable by machines.
For humans and AI alike. Both benefit from the same thing — structured
epistemic state instead of epistemic state inferred from prose. Claims are
pre-chunked and ID'd. Evidence is explicit. Confidence is typed. Contradictions
are flagged. Humans get an auditable format; AI gets a context-engineered one —
the model doesn't have to re-derive on every pass what the document is actually
claiming. This is the same insight that motivates llms.txt, AGENTS.md, and
the current wave of "context docs" formats, pushed further into how knowledge
is represented rather than just how it's indexed.
Read spec/CORE.md -- the implementable Core specification. It covers pack structure, manifest schema, claim syntax, evidence, confidence, relations, and validation rules. Everything you need to build a conformant parser.
A claim in KP:1 looks like this:
- [C001] Cost decline is structural, not cyclical
{0.95|i|E001,E002|2026-03-01|exhaustive|judgment}
Learning curve has held for 40 years. →C002, ⊗~C003Each claim has an ID, an assertion, a confidence/type/evidence block, and optional context with relations to other claims.
| Directory | Purpose |
|---|---|
spec/ |
Normative specification -- CORE.md, SPEC.md, and companion documents |
conformance/ |
PEG grammar, JSON Schema, and 10 test fixtures |
examples/ |
Two complete .kpack examples |
positioning/ |
Public-facing positioning and design rationale |
research/ |
Benchmark design and prior art analysis |
reference/ |
Reference parser and tooling (planned) |
decisions/ |
Design decision records |
scripts/ |
Git hooks and validation helpers |
Top-level governance and policy files include GOVERNANCE.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md, LICENSE, LICENSE-CODE, and DCO.txt.
Two complete Knowledge Packs demonstrate the format:
-
Solar Energy Market -- Market analysis with cost trajectories, technology trends, and regional adoption. Shows dense claim syntax, confidence levels, evidence references, and inter-claim relations including contradictions.
-
KP External Assessment -- A self-assessment of the KP format itself. Demonstrates meta-level claims and the format's ability to represent epistemic state about its own design.
The conformance suite provides formal validation tools:
- PEG grammar (
conformance/grammar/kp-claims.peg) -- parseable definition of claims.md syntax - JSON Schema (
conformance/grammar/kp-pack.schema.json) -- validation schema for PACK.yaml manifests - 10 test fixtures -- 5 valid packs that must be accepted, 5 invalid packs that must be rejected with specific errors
A conformant implementation parses all valid fixtures, rejects all invalid ones, validates PACK.yaml against the schema, and enforces semantic constraints SC-01 through SC-11. See conformance/README.md for details.
KP:1 has its own syntax and semantics, but it can interoperate with RDF/JSON-LD, PROV-O, and Nanopublications. spec/MAPPING.md provides a field-by-field translation analysis grading each mapping as clean, lossy, or impossible -- so practitioners using existing semantic web toolchains can assess what they gain and what they lose.
This is an editor's draft maintained by a single editor in a public repository. It is published as KP:1 Public Draft — 2026-04 (git tag v0.7-preview). It has a formal grammar, a JSON Schema, a conformance suite with 10 test fixtures, and two reference examples.
The specification is not final and may change in any way at any time, including breaking changes. It is not yet ratified by any standards body. Compatibility commitments will arrive only with a non-draft version. See GOVERNANCE.md for the full governance picture, including how decisions are made during the preview phase and what changes when the Knowledge Pack Foundation is incorporated.
The current phase is feedback-only: the editor welcomes issues, comparisons, ambiguity reports, and adversarial review through GitHub issues, but does not accept external pull requests modifying normative spec text. See CONTRIBUTING.md for details.
KP:1 is published under two licenses:
- Specification text (everything in
spec/and the prose portions of this README) is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY-4.0). You may share and adapt the material for any purpose, including commercially, with attribution. - Code, schemas, and examples (everything in
conformance/,examples/,scripts/) is licensed under the Apache License 2.0, which includes an explicit patent grant.
See CONTRIBUTING.md for the contribution policy and GOVERNANCE.md for governance details.
If you reference KP:1 in academic, technical, or evaluative work, please use the metadata in CITATION.cff. The v0.7-preview release is published on Zenodo with DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19445263. The recommended short form is:
Kompanchenko, T. (2026). KP:1 — Knowledge Pack Format Specification (Version 0.7-preview). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19445263
The editor and an acknowledgment of AI drafting assistance are also recorded in ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.md.
KP:1™ is a pending United States trademark. "Knowledge Pack" is the descriptive name of the format and is not currently a registered or pending trademark. See GOVERNANCE.md for the conformance and trademark use policy.
