KP:1 Public Draft — 2026-04: A Format for Packaging Epistemic State

Knowledge Pack 1 (KP:1) is a plain-text format for packaging epistemic state — claims with explicit confidence, evidence, provenance, relationships, and contradictions. A Knowledge Pack is a directory of human-readable Markdown files that records what a person or an AI system believes, on what evidence, with what confidence, and in tension with what else, as understood at a particular moment in time. Each claim carries an identifier, a confidence value, references to its evidence, a since-date, an assessment depth, and an evidence nature. Each relationship between claims (supports, contradicts, supersedes, refines) is typed. The result: epistemic state is encoded in the document, not reconstructed from prose by the reader — whether that reader is a human or a parser. Why a new format? Existing formats stop short. RDF and JSON-LD interchange machines beautifully but aren't meant to be read by humans. Knowledge graphs and argumentation frameworks capture structure but not the same bundle of provenance, time, and confidence conventions. Recent "context docs" conventions like llms.txt and AGENTS.md index content for AI consumption but stop at indexing — they don't say how knowledge itself should be represented. KP:1 picks up where they leave off. This editor's draft, v0.7-preview, dated 2026-04, is prepared as the first public release. It contains: CORE.md — the implementable normative core A full specification with eleven companion documents covering voice surfaces, composition, lifecycle, multilingual support, organization, storage, and bundling A concept-by-concept mapping to RDF/JSON-LD, PROV-O, and Nanopublications, with each translation graded clean, lossy, or impossible A PEG grammar and a JSON Schema A ten-fixture conformance suite (five valid, five invalid) with a Python test runner Two worked examples — one of which is a self-assessment of KP:1 written in KP:1 The specification is edited by Timothy Kompanchenko under an editor's-draft governance model. The preview phase is feedback-only: normative pull requests against the spec text, grammar, schema, and conformance fixtures are not accepted. Comments, implementation experiments, and adversarial critique are welcome through the public issue tracker once the source repository is published. A nonprofit foundation is in formation and will take over governance from the single-editor phase. Specification text is licensed under CC-BY-4.0. Code, schemas, and examples are licensed under Apache-2.0. KP:1™ is a pending US trademark (USPTO Serial No. 99747548, Class 9).