Open Knowledge Graph
Google just shipped the Open Knowledge Format (OKF): markdown files with YAML frontmatter, cross-linked, version-controlled, git-native. Genuinely useful. Also, it’s not a knowledge graph, despite the marketing copy calling the link structure exactly that.
A directed graph of markdown files linking to other markdown files is a web of documents. A knowledge graph is a graph of entities and typed relations, not a hyperlink a human (or an LLM) has to interpret by reading prose.
OKF’s only structural guarantee is one required frontmatter field, called ‘type’. Everything else, what relations mean, what a link implies, whether “links to” means “depends on,” “is part of,” or “see also” is left to the producer. That’s not a knowledge graph schema, that’s an undefined edge label pretending to be one. So, once again the concept of what a knowledge graph is, is being abused.
This matters for agents specifically. An LLM reading an OKF still has to infer the semantics of every link from surrounding markdown text, every single time. A real KG with RDF/OWL or a property graph schema lets you skip that inference step entirely. The relation type is already explicit, queryable, and consistent across the whole graph. One does context-stuffing for a model that re-reads and re-interprets. The other does retrieval and reasoning over structured relations that don’t need re-interpreting.
Now, of course, Google wasn’t going to push the whole RDF stack into the hands of SEO people. Markdown was inevitable, especially with the whole OpenClaw spirit hanging around. So, OKF solves a real problem but also a bit a missed opportunity. Calling markdown-links-as-graph a “knowledge graph” is misleading.