Nowledge Mem now speaks the Open Knowledge Format

Earlier this year, when Andrej Karpathy described the LLM Wiki, a lot of Mem users probably smiled the way we did: that is already how we work. So we built our reading surface around it and shipped it in v0.8. Keep your knowledge as many small markdown pages, each focused on one entity or topic, cross-linked, with an index you can navigate. The LLM does the bookkeeping; you curate.

This week Google Cloud’s Knowledge Catalog team published the Open Knowledge Format (OKF). It takes that same pattern and writes it down as a spec. In the words of Sam McVeety and Amir Hormati, who introduced it, OKF “formalizes the LLM-wiki pattern into a portable, interoperable format.” Reading that line gave us the same familiar feeling: this is the thing we have been building all along, only now it has a name and a shape other tools can read.

So we read the spec, held it up against what Mem already produces, found that most of it lined up, and shipped an OKF export. You can try it today.

What OKF is

OKF is deliberately small. A knowledge bundle is a directory of markdown files with YAML frontmatter. Nothing more.

The only required field is type. Links between concepts are ordinary markdown links. An index.md gives you a table of contents, a log.md records history, and a # Citations section backs up claims. That is the whole format.

The point of keeping it that small is in the post’s own framing: “What’s missing is a format, not another service.” A bundle is just markdown, so it renders on GitHub and opens in any editor. It is just files, so it ships as a folder or a tarball and lives in version control next to the code it describes. And it is readable by a person and parseable by an agent at the same time, with no translation layer in between.

Why this fits Mem so well

Honestly, Mem has been emitting almost exactly this for a while. Our Knowledge Filesystem already projects the whole graph as markdown with frontmatter, and the Library’s Wiki Export already ships your topics, entities, and crystals as a portable folder. What OKF added is the one piece we could not give ourselves: a spec everyone agrees on. With that, the bundle we write is one other tools already know how to read.

Closing the gap was mostly fiddly bookkeeping. OKF reserves type for the kind of concept, so an entity’s type: Entity now carries its person-or-product kind in a separate field. Links are written as bundle-relative markdown paths alongside the [[wikilinks]] you see inside Mem. Each directory gets its own index.md, and crystal sources become a # Citations list. None of it touched how Mem actually runs. It only changed how the export looks on the way out.

What you get

The Library’s export button now offers two formats:

Exporting an OKF bundle from the Library in Nowledge Mem

• Markdown wiki is the same Obsidian-flavored folder you already had: [[wikilinks]], ready to drop into Obsidian, Logseq, or any markdown app.
• OKF bundle is the vendor-neutral version: a spec-conformant bundle that any OKF reader can open, including the reference viewer Google ships.

We ran a real export through Google’s own reference checker. A full bundle from our own graph, several hundred concept pages, passed every last one, with the non-English entity names kept intact. So if your work lives in Mem, you can hand it to anything that speaks OKF and trust it reads cleanly.

Both exports are a snapshot, not a sync target. Edit the files outside Mem and the changes do not flow back. Want a fresh copy? Export again.

Credit

The credit here belongs to the OKF authors and the Knowledge Catalog team. They did the harder and more generous thing: instead of shipping one more proprietary surface, they specified an open format and invited everyone to use it. Their post is explicit that “contributions, alternative implementations, and adoption beyond Google products are all explicitly welcomed,” and that “the format itself is the contribution.”

We are happy to be among the first to pick it up, and we want to give something back. Mem carries a few things the v0.1 draft does not describe yet, like bi-temporal history and evolution chains between concepts, and those feel worth bringing upstream rather than forking over. For now, the most useful thing we can do is make our own knowledge speak the format, so real data flows through it from outside Google.

Try it

1. Open the Library and switch to the Wiki tab. If it is empty, open the Graph view, run community detection once, and come back.
2. Click Download on the tab row and pick OKF bundle.
3. Unzip it. Open index.md in any markdown reader and click your way through the topics, entities, and crystals.
4. Drop the folder into Google’s reference viewer, or any other OKF tool, and read the same knowledge somewhere else entirely.

Download Nowledge Mem · Library docs · Read the OKF spec · Read Google’s announcement