The Open Knowledge Format (OKF), introduced in June 2026 as a lightweight format for agent-usable context (table schemas, metric definitions, runbooks), received strong community feedback that led to v0.2. The core concern: once agents write to the corpus continuously, human authorship guarantees disappear. v0.2 addresses this by adding optional trust signals in frontmatter, answering five questions: provenance (what was this created from?), trust (how much should I trust it?), freshness (is it still true?), lifecycle (is it the current version?), and attestation (was this number computed the sanctioned way?). All new fields are opt-in; the only required field remains type. Absence of a signal now carries meaning — an unverified concept is distinguishable from a verified one, but never rejected.

The post details each signal family. Provenance uses a sources field listing external docs, bundle-relative paths, or scope descriptors, along with objective signals like author, usage_count, last_modified. Crucially, OKF records signals, not a credibility score — scores are subjective and go stale. Trust is split into generated (who produced it and when) and verified (a list of independent confirmations). Consumers derive a trust tier: unverified, machine-confirmed, or human-reviewed. Freshness uses stale_after (absolute date) and lifecycle uses status (draft → stable → deprecated). An absolute date for staleness ensures deterministic comparison without runtime context. Attestation introduces a new concept type, Attested Computation, which carries a sanctioned computation (e.g., SQL) and its parameters, plus a means to check that the sanctioned thing actually ran. A deterministic attester (e.g., comparing canonical SQL forms) returns a verdict; the consumer refuses to display the value if it fails. Attestation is per-call and never stored in the bundle, distinct from verification (which is slow, doc-level, and stored).

The post uses a fictional acme_retail bundle throughout to illustrate each field. The reference implementations (proofs of concept) are updated: reference_agent emits provenance and trust fields, the static visualizer surfaces trust tier and status, sample bundles (GA4, Stack Overflow, Bitcoin, acme_retail) carry v0.2 fields, and a Knowledge Catalog demo shows round-tripping through Google Cloud‘s Knowledge Catalog. Compatibility is backward-compatible: timestamp is superseded by generated.at, and the old # Citations list by sources; v0.2 consumers fall back to v0.1 forms. The post ends with a call to read the spec, write producers/consumers, try Attested Computations, and contribute.