It is time to share some insights on the current updates regarding the technical development of OKH and its surrounding toolkit, plus a few hints on what else is about to be possible due to the fruits of this effort.
Recap
In 2022 we had an ongoing discussion about the merge of OKHv1 and OKH-LOSH. Within the past years, this was an ongoing exchange and after the end of the OPEN!NEXT and the continuation within DAPSI in 2023, OKH-LOSH was officially adopted by IoPA as the new v2 of OKH in 2024, which you can find in its current state in the:
Open Know-How Development Repository
Within that time span, also the INTERFACER Project used the OKH data to feed FabCity OS.
More organizations adopted the standard, and while some still use OKHv1, there is now a tool that can translate the old standard into the new OKHv2 format.
Learnings
In all those development phases it became obvious, that proper tooling is required to validate the ontology of OKH, do automated checks and evaluation of the scraped meta-data for (Open Source) Hardware projects and provide a solid linked data DB for a distributed approach of data collection and searching. This is where the idea for a new spin to the project under the fund of NGI Search emerged, which led to a various improvements for the OKH development tool-chain and the Linked-Data ecosystem beyond that. If you are into the origins and technical details of RDF, Linked Open Data and Ontologies, please make sure to check out the new website presenting the ecosystem of tools:
Exploring Technology through Linked Open Data
What is next?
Here we want to outline improvements this funding rounds effort brings to OKH and the software tools surrounding it.
On the 11th of June 2025 we are sharing more insight on the development and would like to open the discussion and development collaboration for a new era of OKH: Hardware searches and related ontologies, creating a semantic web of technology and engineering.
Find out more at this post and join in:
Following this exchange, we are working on a new search engine demo until end of June, which will provide new possibilities, more data collected then ever, and introduce tools and guidance for Hardware developers sharing their manifest files and interoperability within the community. This will incorporate the new OKHv2 and even if our server might be just a demo, provide everyone with the tools and documentation to setup their own scraping, checking, transforming and search engine server, for a better, more distributed development and data collection.
We hope this will contribute to a much more robust implementation of OKH and other standards, and would like your input on this.
For development related feedback/discussions, please open or comment issues in the OKH GitHub Repository.