# AKO = Active Knowledge Object

AKO stands for Active Knowledge Object.

An AKO is a bounded, governed, inspectable unit of knowledge designed to move into trustworthy human and AI action without losing identity, provenance, review state, or policy boundaries.

## Short definition

An Active Knowledge Object is a unit of knowledge with:

- an identity
- an explicit boundary
- attached provenance
- attached review and governance state
- the ability to move into use without losing what it is

## Why it exists

Most AI workflows still move knowledge around as a mixture of prompts, excerpts, files, policies, copied context, retrieval results, and generated text.

That makes knowledge hard to cite, hard to verify, and hard to govern.

AKO exists to solve that first problem: before building bigger knowledge worlds, there needs to be one unit that can be inspected, governed, and moved.

## What it is not

An AKO is not a chatbot, not a prompt template, not a random JSON blob, not a giant context window, and not the whole OpenAKO system.

It is the smallest governed knowledge unit that makes the rest of the system possible.

## Canonical machine-readable sources

- https://openako.org/knowledge/
- https://openako.org/
- https://openako.org/index.md
- https://openako.org/index.json
- https://openako.org/ako/
- https://openako.org/ako/index.md
- https://openako.org/ako/index.json