“The open knowledge graph is going to have the additional benefit of not only interconnecting your pages, but being compatible with other programs, with other apps, with AI bot engine scanners and surfers and all that kind of stuff.” — Lou
Session context: 2026-07-02_Mastermind — while discussing second-brain and wiki work, Lou flagged Google’s newly published Open Knowledge Format (OKF) and dropped the spec links in chat.
Core Idea
Most personal knowledge bases are wired together with WikiLinks — the [[double-bracket]] Obsidian convention. It works: it interconnects your pages, and (as this vault demonstrates) an AI can generate those links automatically so the maintenance tax disappears. But WikiLinks are a local dialect. They knit your pages to each other and stop there. Google’s Open Knowledge Format (OKF) is a published specification for how knowledge graphs should be expressed as markdown so they’re portable — readable not just inside your vault but by other apps, other themes, and, critically, by the AI engines that scan and cite the web.
Lou’s framing: treat OKF as the format to target when you generate, not a thing to hand-convert later. Instead of telling your wiki generator (his combined v2 of the Karpathy LLM-wiki) to emit Obsidian-flavored output, tell it to emit OKF-compatible markdown. Ideally OKF turns out to be a superset or a formalization of what WikiLinks already give you — you keep the internal interconnection and gain external interoperability, possibly while staying Obsidian-compatible too. He’s honest that he doesn’t yet know how large the delta is (“I don’t know if that’s a lot different, or just a little bit different”) and puts the experiment on his tinker list — but the strategic logic is clear and one-directional.
Why it matters for authority: the whole GEO argument is that AI cites what lives in structured, machine-trusted knowledge graphs (Insight - Anchor Your Authority in the Knowledge Graph Before You Need It). A second brain that’s only legible to you is an inference engine for your own thinking; a second brain expressed in a standard the web already reads is also an authority surface. Same content, same graph, but one is a private notebook and the other is discoverable infrastructure. The cost to choose the second is close to zero if you decide it at generation time rather than retrofitting.
Practical Application
Before your next knowledge-base build or regeneration, read the OKF spec (github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/knowledge-catalog/blob/main/okf/SPEC.md) and give it to Claude as context. Then run a small experiment: point your wiki generator at a subset of your intake and ask it to produce OKF-compatible markdown instead of plain WikiLinks, and diff the result against your current output. Check two things — did you keep the internal cross-linking you rely on, and is it still viewable in Obsidian/your reader? If OKF is a clean superset, switch your generator’s default output format to OKF so every future page is born portable and AI-legible. Don’t hand-migrate existing pages; regenerate.
Related Insights
- Insight - Anchor Your Authority in the Knowledge Graph Before You Need It — the GEO thesis this serves: AI cites what lives in trusted, structured graphs; OKF makes your graph one of them.
- Insight - Build Your Ontology First, Then Let Content Follow — OKF is the interchange format for the ontology; ontology is the what, OKF is the how it travels.
- Insight - You Are Becoming an Answer Provider, Not Just a Website — a portable, machine-readable graph is what an answer provider exposes.
- Insight - The Living Knowledge Base in Action — From Transcript to Intelligence Graph — the generation pipeline that would emit OKF instead of WikiLinks.
- Insight - Your Second Brain Isn’t a Search Engine — It’s an Inference Engine — the private-value view; OKF adds the public-authority view on top of the same graph.
Evolution Across Sessions
Extends Insight - Anchor Your Authority in the Knowledge Graph Before You Need It and the GEARS/Wikidata-anchoring thread with a concrete, newly available standard: where earlier sessions connected individual glossary terms to Wikidata, OKF proposes a format for the whole graph to be portable and AI-scannable by default. It also gives the vault’s own Insight - The Living Knowledge Base in Action — From Transcript to Intelligence Graph pipeline a forward-looking output target. First instance of OKF in the vault — establishes the baseline; future sessions should test how much of the Karpathy-wiki behavior survives an OKF-native rebuild and whether Obsidian compatibility holds.