If you can cat a file, you can read the knowledge base. If you can git clone a repo, you can ship it. No vector database to stand up, no proprietary export format, no vendor lock-in — just a directory of markdown files with YAML frontmatter that a human can open in any editor and an agent can read with ReadFile. That's the whole pitch, and it's the reason I spent the last few weeks porting a library to C# to get it onto .NET.
The format behind that pitch is Google's Open Knowledge Format (OKF) v0.2, and the library is OKF4net (docs & project site) — a zero-dependency .NET
(C#, net10.0) implementation, plus an optional layer for wiring OKF bundles straight into agents built on the Microsoft Agent Framework. This post is the launch story: what OKF actually is, why I ported it instead of writing a wrapper, and what "zero dependency" really costs and buys you.
What OKF is
OKF defines a bundle: a directory tree of UTF-8 markdown files, where each file is a concept — a YAML frontmatter block followed by a markdown body. Concepts cross-link each other with ordinary markdown links, index.md files give you progressive-disclosure directory listings, and log.md files record date-grouped change history. The only hard conformance requirement is a non-empty type field on every concept; everything else — unknown types, unknown keys, broken links — has to be tolerated by a conformant consumer. It's deliberately boring as a format, which is the point: the format is context here, not the pitch. The pitch is what you get to do with plain files — diff them, review them in a PR, grep them, back them up with nothing but git.
