KP:1 Public Draft — 2026-06: 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 relationship between claims (supports, contradicts, supersedes, refines, see-also) 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? 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; "context docs" conventions like llms.txt and AGENTS.md index content for AI consumption but stop at indexing. KP:1 picks up where they leave off. This is v0.8.4-preview (2026-06), an editor's draft in the v0.8.x preview line. The format defines a strict normative core (CORE.md, a JSON Schema, and a PEG grammar) plus topic-authoritative companions for authoring, voice, composition, lifecycle, multilingual support, archival, extensions, mapping to RDF/JSON-LD/PROV-O/Nanopublications, independence, and rationale. A conformance suite of 18 fixtures (6 valid, 12 invalid) plus 5 reference example packs validates 23/23 in both the default and strict-PEG modes. New in v0.8.4-preview: a new INDEPENDENCE.md companion stating KP:1's ownership and capture-resistance guarantees — zero-dependency readability (the directory and Rosetta header alone are sufficient; spec_uri is never fetched), freedom to fork (CC-BY-4.0; the KP:1 mark is defensive only), no required registry or central service, optional-not-mandatory cryptography, and portability of accrued knowledge; it is documentary in force (the irrevocable lock is the CC-BY-4.0 license plus distributed copies) and normative in intent, with the throughline that capture-resistance is subtraction, not addition. The conformance suite now exercises the offline-validation invariant: validation never fetches or depends on spec_uri. Capture-resistance non-goals are recorded in the positioning document, and the rationale clarifies that contradiction-preservation is epistemic pluralism (paraconsistent at the pack level), not a metaphysical claim. No core schema break: existing packs continue to validate. The specification is edited by Timothy Kompanchenko under an editor's-draft governance model; the preview phase is feedback-only. Comments, implementation experiments, and adversarial critique are welcome through the public issue tracker at github.com/tymofiy/kp. 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 under Apache-2.0. KP:1™ is a pending US trademark (USPTO Serial No. 99747548, Class 9).