Related standards, and when to use them instead

KNOBE occupies a deliberately small corner: a single plain-text file that carries its own context and integrity seal, requires no infrastructure or identity system to read or verify, and degrades gracefully to ordinary markdown when no tooling is present. Most neighboring standards are better than KNOBE at something specific. The comparisons below say what, and when to use them instead.

Git

Git is version control inside a repository: it answers "what changed here, when, by whom" with great precision, as long as the file stays home. The moment a file is emailed, uploaded to an LMS, pasted into a chat, or ingested by a RAG pipeline, its Git history stays behind. KNOBE is built for that exit moment: the context rides inside the file itself. Git answers "what changed here"; KNOBE answers "what is this, where did it come from, what may you do with it" wherever the file lands.

C2PA (Content Credentials)

C2PA is the closest neighbor and, for media, the more mature one. It binds provenance manifests to images, video, and audio, with real cryptographic signing backed by a certificate infrastructure. Where it differs: C2PA manifests are embedded binary structures aimed at media assets and assume signing infrastructure; KNOBE targets plain-text knowledge work, stays human-readable with no tooling at all, and requires no identity system. In v1, attribution is declared, not signed, by design.

If you need signed identity today, C2PA (for media) or Verifiable Credentials (for claims) offer what KNOBE v1 deliberately does not. KNOBE serves the no-PKI, plain-text, degradation-tolerant corner C2PA does not; a future signed KNOBE profile is designed to compose with certificate- or credential-based identity rather than reinvent it.

W3C Verifiable Credentials

VCs prove claims made by identified issuers (for example, "University X states that person Y completed Z"), and presume issuer infrastructure: DIDs, key management, revocation. KNOBE carries context without requiring identity: its floor is intentionally lower, so a student, archivist, or script can produce a valid object with nothing but a text editor and a hash. Where identity-backed claims matter, a VC can travel inside or alongside a KNOBE. They are complementary layers, not rivals.

W3C PROV

PROV is the standards-grade vocabulary for provenance (entities, activities, agents), designed for provenance databases and queryable graphs. It defines how to describe lineage richly; it does not define a self-contained, sealed, human-readable file that survives being emailed. KNOBE's parents and transformation_history fields are a deliberately small subset of what PROV can express. A KNOBE profile mapping its fields onto PROV terms is a natural future bridge.

RO-Crate

RO-Crate packages research data (datasets, code, and their metadata) as a directory with a JSON-LD manifest, aimed at repositories and machine actionability. It is the right answer for datasets. KNOBE is one file, human-first, aimed at documents and knowledge artifacts rather than data packages, and it defines sealing and verification semantics RO-Crate does not.

Dublin Core (and metadata standards generally)

Dublin Core gives shared names for descriptive fields: creator, date, rights. KNOBE's problem is not naming but survival and accountability: ordinary metadata is exactly what pipelines strip, and nothing in Dublin Core detects that the description was altered or separated from its object. KNOBE adds the envelope: sealed payload, integrity hash, verification states, transformation history, fidelity limits, use conditions. Where sensible, KNOBE vocabulary stays mappable to Dublin Core terms rather than competing with them.

Knowledge graphs

A knowledge graph is a centralized representation queried in place, powerful for linking and inference inside a system you control. KNOBE is what a node carries when it leaves the graph. The two are complementary by construction: a graph can ingest KNOBEs (their payloads are structured JSON) and can emit KNOBEs when knowledge exits its boundary. If your knowledge never leaves your platform, you may not need KNOBE. Much of it does.

Metadata and front-matter

Front-matter metadata is the content of the solution; KNOBE's contribution is the transport guarantee. YAML front-matter alone is silently editable, routinely stripped, and carries no tamper evidence. KNOBE keeps that metadata attached and verifiable: self-contained, hash-sealed, with defined verification semantics, published test vectors, and graceful degradation to readable text. If plain front-matter meets your needs, use it; KNOBE's YAML layer is deliberately compatible with that practice, so the upgrade path is short.

Summary

Knowledge increasingly moves as files and fragments through systems that strip context, and the lowest-infrastructure unit of repair is the object itself. Where a neighboring standard solves your problem, use it. Where knowledge has to leave the systems those standards live in, seal what it must carry.