For years, content management systems have been optimized for people and search engines.
Pages, posts, taxonomies, custom post types, categories, tags, and internal links all work well for publishing content on the web.
But modern AI systems need something different.
They need structure.
They need relationships.
They need knowledge.
This is where the Open Knowledge Format (OKF) becomes interesting.
The Problem
Most WordPress websites contain valuable knowledge.
A real estate website may contain:
- Projects
- Developers
- Cities
- Properties
A SaaS website may contain:
- Features
- Documentation
- Guides
- Integrations
- FAQs
A university website may contain:
- Courses
- Departments
- Professors
- Research papers
The information exists.
The relationships exist.
But the knowledge is trapped inside HTML pages.
For humans, that is fine.
For AI systems, it is not ideal.
What Is OKF?
Open Knowledge Format (OKF) is an open specification introduced by Google Cloud as a lightweight way to represent knowledge using Markdown files.
Instead of storing knowledge in a graph database or a proprietary format, OKF uses:
- Directories
- Markdown documents
- Metadata
- Links
Every document becomes a concept.
Every link becomes a relationship.
The result is a portable and AI-friendly knowledge graph.
Why WordPress?
WordPress powers a large portion of the web.
Yet most WordPress content is still distributed as HTML.
If we can transform WordPress content into OKF documents, we gain:
- Structured knowledge representation
- Better AI ingestion
- Portable knowledge graphs
- Vendor independence
- Human-readable storage
- Git-friendly versioning
Building Knowledge Layer
To explore this idea, I built Knowledge Layer:
https://github.com/wooserv/wp-knowledge-layer
Knowledge Layer is a WordPress plugin that synchronizes WordPress content into Open Knowledge Format documents.
The goal is simple:
Transform WordPress content into a persistent Markdown-based knowledge graph.
The plugin supports:
- Pages
- Posts
- Custom Post Types
- Taxonomies
- Internal links
- Incremental synchronization
Instead of rebuilding everything repeatedly, content is synchronized as it changes.
How It Works
When content is published:
- WordPress content is discovered.
- HTML is converted into Markdown.
- Metadata is extracted.
- Internal links are rewritten.
- OKF documents are generated.
- The knowledge graph is updated.
The resulting files remain readable by both humans and AI systems.
Why Markdown?
Markdown provides several advantages:
- Human-readable
- Version controllable
- Portable
- AI-friendly
- Easy to inspect
- Easy to archive
Most importantly, Markdown does not require specialized infrastructure.
The Future
As AI systems increasingly consume structured knowledge, websites need more than pages and posts.
They need a way to expose their knowledge in an open and portable format.
OKF provides a promising foundation.
WordPress already contains the knowledge.
The next step is making that knowledge accessible.
Knowledge Layer is one attempt to bridge that gap.
References
Google Cloud:
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/how-the-open-knowledge-format-can-improve-data-sharing
Open Knowledge Format Specification:
https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/knowledge-catalog/blob/main/okf/SPEC.md
Community Resources:
https://suganthan.com/blog/open-knowledge-format/
