Open Specifications
Declared, not inferred.
Some things an organization knows about itself are rarely stated in a form other systems can read directly: where one governance layer ends and another begins, where one concept ends and an adjacent one begins. Left undeclared, that information gets reconstructed by inference, by search engines, by AI systems, by anyone reading the site from outside.
Open Specifications is where these declarations are published: independent, versioned, technology-neutral documents that state a boundary explicitly instead of leaving it to be guessed. Each specification addresses a different layer. All of them follow the same design philosophy.
Current specifications
Governance Layer Manifest (GLM)
Declares the boundaries of a governance architecture: what it does, what it does not do, and where it ends before another system’s claims begin. Interoperability emerges from independently readable boundary declarations, not from negotiated integration claims.
Knowledge Boundary Manifest (KBM)
Declares the boundaries of a site’s published knowledge: which concepts are canonical, what the site explicitly does not claim, which terms are commonly and incorrectly treated as equivalent, and which documents are authoritative.
Specification status
| Specification | Status |
|---|---|
| Governance Layer Manifest (GLM) | Stable |
| Knowledge Boundary Manifest (KBM) | Draft 0.1 |
| Reserved | — |
Shared conventions
Every specification in this family uses the same metadata conventions for its published instances: a schema version separate from the instance version, an explicit validity window, and a structured digest object. These conventions are not owned by any single specification. A dedicated Open Specifications Core, describing them independently of GLM or KBM, is planned once enough independent implementations exist to justify formalizing it on its own.
Machine-readable index
The full list of specifications in this family is also available at /.well-known/open-specifications.json. Each specification additionally publishes its own manifest at a well-known location under /.well-known/. Changes to specifications in this family are tracked in the changelog.
Note on scope
Each specification here is authoritative only for what its declaring organization has itself published. A specification does not evaluate truth, does not validate accuracy on behalf of third parties, and does not prescribe how any other organization must structure its own declarations. It states what is possible to declare, and provides a format for declaring it.