kuument

kuUMENT is a knowledge-management framework and reference implementation designed to enable the creation, encoding, and transport of structured knowledge units (KUs). It emphasizes provenance, verifiability, and interoperability across systems. The project defines a compact set of data models and a transport protocol that allow researchers, archivists, and developers to store and exchange knowledge units with tamper-evident guarantees.

Core concepts include Knowledge Units (KUs), which are self-describing chunks of information with metadata, content, and cryptographic signatures. Each KU is identified by a content-addressable identifier derived from its serialized form. The kuUMENT protocol supports versioning, branching, and lineage tracking, enabling reconstruction of the KU's history and derivations.

Architecture comprises client libraries, a transport layer, and a storage backend. The transport can operate over traditional RESTful endpoints or peer-to-peer channels, using Merkle trees to provide efficient integrity proofs. Metadata is serialized in JSON-LD and can be mapped to RDF graphs to aid integration with existing semantic-web tooling.

History and status: kuUMENT originated in theoretical discussions around reliable knowledge exchange and has since become a community-driven, open-source project. It is distributed under a permissive license and has experimental implementations in several languages.

Applications: used for digital archives, collaborative research notes, and educational repositories where provenance and authenticity are critical.