okf: add rationale to the recommended frontmatter fields#168
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Adds an optional rationale key — a single sentence stating why a concept exists or why its current value was chosen — to the 4.1 frontmatter template and the recommended field list. A stated rationale lets consumers reconcile disagreeing documents by intent rather than recency alone. Falls under the existing "producers MAY include any additional keys" rule, so no parser or version change.
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Three small, independent, honestly-scoped Claude Code / OKF utilities. okf-provenance (PerceptionRationale) is the main piece: an optional signed provenance layer for OKF bundles, measured three experiments deep against real external data, with the null results reported alongside the wins. FINDINGS.md carries the full bug ledger (ours and upstream's); RATIONALE.md carries the reasoning chain. Sibling of GoogleCloudPlatform/knowledge-catalog#168. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Three small, independent, honestly-scoped Claude Code / OKF utilities. okf-provenance (PerceptionRationale) is the main piece: an optional signed provenance layer for OKF bundles, measured three experiments deep against real external data, with the null results reported alongside the wins. FINDINGS.md carries the full bug ledger (ours and upstream's); RATIONALE.md carries the reasoning chain. Sibling of GoogleCloudPlatform/knowledge-catalog#168. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Three small, independent, honestly-scoped Claude Code / OKF utilities. okf-provenance (PerceptionRationale) is the main piece: an optional signed provenance layer for OKF bundles, measured three experiments deep against real external data, with the null results reported alongside the wins. FINDINGS.md carries the full bug ledger (ours and upstream's); RATIONALE.md carries the reasoning chain. Sibling of GoogleCloudPlatform/knowledge-catalog#168. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Jul 2, 2026
Three small, independent, honestly-scoped Claude Code / OKF utilities. okf-provenance (PerceptionRationale) is the main piece: an optional signed provenance layer for OKF bundles, measured three experiments deep against real external data, with the null results reported alongside the wins. FINDINGS.md carries the full bug ledger (ours and upstream's); RATIONALE.md carries the reasoning chain. Sibling of GoogleCloudPlatform/knowledge-catalog#168. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
virideanil
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to virideanil/claude-code-toolbox
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Jul 2, 2026
Three small, independent, honestly-scoped Claude Code / OKF utilities. okf-provenance (PerceptionRationale) is the main piece: an optional signed provenance layer for OKF bundles, measured three experiments deep against real external data, with the null results reported alongside the wins. FINDINGS.md carries the full bug ledger (ours and upstream's); RATIONALE.md carries the reasoning chain. Sibling of GoogleCloudPlatform/knowledge-catalog#168. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
virideanil
added a commit
to virideanil/claude-code-toolbox
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Jul 2, 2026
Three small, independent, honestly-scoped Claude Code / OKF utilities. okf-provenance (PerceptionRationale) is the main piece: an optional signed provenance layer for OKF bundles, measured three experiments deep against real external data, with the null results reported alongside the wins. FINDINGS.md carries the full bug ledger (ours and upstream's); RATIONALE.md carries the reasoning chain. Sibling of GoogleCloudPlatform/knowledge-catalog#168. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Summary
rationaleto the §4.1 frontmatter template and the recommended fieldlist: a single sentence stating why the concept exists or why its current
value was chosen — the "why" alongside
description's "what".them by intent instead of recency alone. Design-rationale capture is a
long-studied need (IBIS, 1970); the closest existing field is schema.org's
backstory("why and how an article was created"), which is scoped toArticles — no major standard exposes a general-purpose equivalent.
include any additional keys" rule; this names it as recommended, last in the
priority order. No parser or schema-version change;
okftest suite passeswith the change applied (33 passed).
Full reasoning — why this field, why only this field, and what was measured before proposing
Why extend rather than propose more. W3C PROV-O and C2PA already formalize
who/where/how at standards weight — those dimensions need no new field. Why is the
one dimension with no operationalized home in any major standard (checked PROV-O, C2PA,
Dublin Core's fifteen elements, and current production knowledge-base schemas).
Design-rationale capture has been a research field since IBIS (1970) without ever
shipping as a simple metadata field; this proposes the smallest possible version of it,
in the spec's own grammar. The fuller provenance extension (who/where/how blocks, explicit
unknown-value markers, signing, and the measurement code below) is public at
virideanil/claude-code-toolbox
— deliberately NOT part of this PR, because a spec ask should be smaller than an extension.
Why optional and last in priority order. A new field should claim the lowest slot
and change nothing for anyone: it is already legal today under the Extensions rule; this
only names it so producers converge on one key instead of many.
What was measured before proposing. Three paired experiments, the last on this
repo's own live example bundles (crypto_bitcoin / ga4 / stackoverflow — 65 content
documents, unmodified) with a de-confounded 3-engines × 3-formats matrix and paired
mid-p McNemar statistics. Reported with the nulls: structured frontmatter did not
improve retrieval over plain BM25 on unstructured prose (an earlier, better-looking
headline died under proper measurement) — but a structural "why is unknown" marker was
phrasing-invariant where text matching wasn't (1.000 vs 0.500 recall under varied
uncertainty phrasings). The conclusion that motivates exactly this field: declared
metadata earns its keep in reconciliation and in making not-knowing queryable — not in
findability. A stated
rationaleis the smallest unit of that.Two small observations from the same work, separate from this PR and offered in
case useful — happy to file as issues:
toolbox/mdcode's Documents layout readsmetadata.timeStamp(camelCase) where SPEC.md and the committed bundles writetimestamp, and it never mapsresource— so ingesting this repo's own example bundlesthrough that path silently drops both fields.
🤖Worked with Claude Code