Awesome Knowledge Infrastructure

A curated list of tools and practices for capturing, connecting, and operationalizing what your organization (and you) know.

Knowledge infrastructure is the connective tissue that lets people and software find, trust, and act on what an organization knows. It spans capturing knowledge (notes, docs, decisions), connecting it (links, graphs, catalogs), and operationalizing it (search, retrieval, AI assistants) — from a single engineer's note vault to an enterprise's internal developer portal and AI knowledge layer.

The pieces have always existed in scattered categories — wikis, docs tools, search, PKM apps. What's new is treating them as one layer worth designing on purpose. This list is an opinionated map of that layer.

Curated by Taylor Dolezal, drawing on years of work across open source and cloud native infrastructure. Contributions are welcome.

Contents

• Foundations and Concepts
• Personal Knowledge Management
• Wikis and Team Knowledge Bases
• Documentation as Code
• Interoperability and Standards
• Internal Developer Portals
• AI Knowledge Assistants
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation
• Search and Retrieval
• AI Memory and Context
• Orchestration and Durable Execution
• Knowledge Graphs
• Data Catalogs and Metadata
• Architecture Decision Records
• Diagramming and Visualization as Code
• Operational Knowledge
• Read It Later and Annotation
• Learning and Community

Foundations and Concepts

• Building a Second Brain - Tiago Forte's methodology for turning scattered digital information into actionable knowledge.
• Zettelkasten - The "slip-box" method of networked notes that underpins most modern thought tools.
• DIKW Pyramid - A foundational model describing how data becomes information, knowledge, and ultimately wisdom.
• Communities of Practice - Wenger-Trayner's framework for groups that deepen shared expertise through ongoing practice.
• Knowledge-Centered Service - A methodology for capturing and reusing support knowledge as a by-product of solving problems.
• Docs as Code - Treating documentation with the same tools and workflows as software.
• Diátaxis - A systematic framework that organizes docs into tutorials, how-tos, reference, and explanation.
• Team Topologies - Organizing teams and their interactions for fast flow, including how knowledge moves between them.
• GitLab Handbook - The public, version-controlled handbook that models a handbook-first, transparent way of working.
• Working Backwards - Amazon's PR/FAQ and narrative-memo practice for thinking through ideas before building them.

Personal Knowledge Management

• Obsidian - A local-first, Markdown-based knowledge base built on a graph of linked notes.
• Logseq - A privacy-first, open source outliner for networked note-taking and tasks.
• SiYuan - A self-hosted, block-based personal knowledge management system.
• Joplin - An open source note and to-do app with end-to-end encryption and sync.
• Anytype - A local-first, end-to-end encrypted workspace built on an object graph you fully own.
• AppFlowy - An open source Notion alternative for notes, wikis, and projects with local data ownership.
• Trilium Notes - A hierarchical note-taking application for building large personal knowledge bases.
• Org-roam - A plain-text knowledge management system for Emacs Org-mode built on the Zettelkasten method.
• Notion - An all-in-one workspace combining notes, docs, wikis, and databases.
• Roam Research - A note-taking tool for networked thought with bidirectional links and daily notes.

Wikis and Team Knowledge Bases

• Wiki.js - A modern, open source wiki engine with a powerful editor and flexible storage backends.
• BookStack - A simple, open source platform for organizing documentation into books, chapters, and pages.
• DokuWiki - A lightweight, database-free wiki that stores pages as plain text files.
• MediaWiki - The open source wiki engine that powers Wikipedia, built for large collaborative knowledge bases.
• Outline - A fast, open source team knowledge base and wiki with real-time collaboration.
• TiddlyWiki - A self-contained, non-linear personal wiki you can carry in a single HTML file.
• AFFiNE - An open source, local-first workspace that merges documents, whiteboards, and databases.
• Confluence - Atlassian's widely used team workspace for documentation and knowledge sharing.

Documentation as Code

• Docusaurus - A React-based static site generator purpose-built for documentation.
• MkDocs - A fast, simple static site generator geared toward project documentation.
• Material for MkDocs - A popular, feature-rich theme and toolkit on top of MkDocs.
• Sphinx - A powerful documentation generator with rich cross-referencing, widely used in Python.
• Starlight - A documentation theme for Astro with great defaults and performance.
• Read the Docs - A platform that automatically builds, versions, and hosts documentation from your repository.
• VitePress - A Vite-powered static site generator optimized for fast, content-focused documentation.
• Antora - A multi-repository documentation site generator built around AsciiDoc.
• Redoc - An open source tool that renders OpenAPI definitions into reference API documentation.
• GitBook - A hosted platform for writing and publishing polished product and developer documentation.

Interoperability and Standards

• CommonMark - A standardized, unambiguous specification of the Markdown syntax.
• Pandoc - A universal document converter that translates between Markdown, HTML, LaTeX, and dozens of formats.
• Org-mode - An Emacs format and system for authoring, organizing, and exporting structured plain-text documents.
• JSON Canvas - An open file format for infinite-canvas notes, originating in Obsidian.
• Web Annotation Data Model - A W3C standard for representing annotations and highlights on web resources.
• Model Context Protocol - An open protocol that standardizes how applications supply context and tools to LLMs.

Internal Developer Portals

• Backstage - An open platform for building developer portals, with a software catalog and TechDocs.
• Port - A developer portal with a flexible software catalog and self-service actions.
• Cortex - An internal developer portal focused on service catalogs and engineering standards.
• OpsLevel - A service catalog and developer portal for tracking ownership and maturity.
• Clutch - Lyft's extensible platform for infrastructure tooling and developer self-service.
• Roadie - A managed, SaaS version of Backstage for teams that want a developer portal without self-hosting.
• Kratix - An open source framework for building platforms that offer self-service infrastructure as a product.
• Compass - Atlassian's developer experience platform for cataloging services and tracking software health.

AI Knowledge Assistants

• Dosu - An AI teammate that answers questions, triages issues, and maintains knowledge from your codebase and docs.
• Onyx - An open source AI assistant and enterprise search over your team's documents and apps (formerly Danswer).
• Khoj - A self-hostable AI second brain that searches and chats across your notes and documents.
• Glean - An enterprise search and AI assistant connected across workplace tools.
• Quivr - An open source framework for building a personal, RAG-powered knowledge assistant.
• Guru - An enterprise knowledge platform that surfaces verified answers in the tools where people work.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation

• LangChain - A framework for building applications with LLMs, including retrieval-augmented generation.
• LlamaIndex - A data framework for connecting custom data sources to LLMs.
• Haystack - An end-to-end framework for building search and RAG pipelines.
• txtai - An all-in-one embeddings database for semantic search, RAG, and LLM orchestration.
• RAGFlow - An open source RAG engine built on deep document understanding for grounded question answering.
• Unstructured - Open source libraries for ingesting and preprocessing documents into LLM-ready data.
• Docling - An open source toolkit that parses PDFs, Office files, and more into structured, LLM-ready formats.
• Sentence Transformers - A Python library for state-of-the-art text and image embeddings used in semantic search.

Search and Retrieval

• LanceDB - An embedded, open source vector database for multimodal AI built on the Lance format.
• Meilisearch - A fast, typo-tolerant, open source search engine.
• Elasticsearch - A distributed search and analytics engine for full-text, structured, and vector search.
• Apache Solr - A mature, Lucene-based open source search platform for large-scale deployments.
• Quickwit - A cloud-native, open source search engine optimized for logs and large append-only datasets.
• pgvector - Open source vector similarity search for PostgreSQL.
• Qdrant - A high-performance, open source vector database for similarity search.
• Weaviate - An open source vector database with built-in vectorization and hybrid search.
• Chroma - An open source embedding database designed for building AI applications quickly.
• Milvus - A cloud-native, open source vector database built for massive-scale similarity search.

AI Memory and Context

• Mem0 - An open source memory layer that gives AI agents persistent, personalized recall.
• Letta - An open source framework (formerly MemGPT) for building stateful agents with long-term memory.
• Graphiti - An open source framework for building temporally-aware knowledge graphs for agent memory.
• cognee - An open source framework for building memory and knowledge graphs for AI agents from your data.

Orchestration and Durable Execution

• DBOS - An open source durable workflow library, backed by PostgreSQL, for building crash-resilient backends, pipelines, and AI agents.
• Temporal - A durable execution platform for orchestrating reliable, long-running workflows and services.
• Restate - An open source durable execution engine for building resilient applications, workflows, and agents.

Knowledge Graphs

• Neo4j - A widely used graph database for connected data and knowledge graphs.
• Memgraph - An in-memory graph database compatible with the Cypher query language.
• Dgraph - A distributed, GraphQL-native graph database.
• Apache Jena - A Java framework for building semantic web and linked-data applications.
• TerminusDB - An open source graph database for collaborative, versioned knowledge.
• RDFLib - A Python library for working with RDF, including parsing, serializing, and SPARQL queries.
• FalkorDB - A low-latency, open source graph database designed for GraphRAG and AI workloads.
• Protégé - A free, open source ontology editor for building OWL ontologies and knowledge models.
• Wikidata - A free, collaborative knowledge graph of structured data maintained by the Wikimedia community.
• schema.org - A shared vocabulary for marking up structured data on the web.

Data Catalogs and Metadata

• DataHub - An open source metadata platform for data discovery, lineage, and governance.
• OpenMetadata - A unified, open source platform for metadata, data discovery, and observability.
• Apache Atlas - An open source framework for data governance and metadata management.
• OpenLineage - An open standard for metadata and lineage collection across data pipelines.
• CKAN - An open source data management system for building open data portals and catalogs.

Architecture Decision Records

• adr-tools - Command-line tools for working with Architecture Decision Records.
• Architecture Decision Record - Templates and examples for capturing architectural decisions.
• MADR - Markdown Any Decision Records, a lean template for documenting decisions.
• Log4brains - A tool to log and publish ADRs as a searchable knowledge base.
• ADR Organization - A community hub of templates, tooling, and guidance for Architecture Decision Records.

Diagramming and Visualization as Code

• Mermaid - A tool for generating diagrams and flowcharts from Markdown-like text.
• PlantUML - A tool for creating UML and many other diagrams from a simple text description.
• D2 - A modern, declarative language and engine for turning text into diagrams.
• Graphviz - An open source toolkit for laying out and rendering graphs from the DOT language.
• Diagrams - A Python library for drawing cloud system architecture diagrams as code.
• Kroki - A unified API that renders many text-based diagram formats into images.
• Excalidraw - An open source virtual whiteboard for sketching hand-drawn-style diagrams.
• C4 model - A lightweight approach for visualizing software architecture at multiple levels of detail.

Operational Knowledge

• PagerDuty Incident Response - PagerDuty's open documentation on running effective incident response.
• Dispatch - Netflix's tool for orchestrating incident response and capturing what was learned.
• Rundeck - Runbook automation that turns operational knowledge into safe, self-service actions.
• Google SRE Books - Google's freely available books on site reliability engineering, including incident response and postmortems.
• Grafana OnCall - An open source on-call and alert management tool for incident response.
• Cachet - An open source status page system for communicating incidents and uptime.

Read It Later and Annotation

• Readwise - A service that syncs and resurfaces your highlights from books, articles, and more.
• Hypothesis - An open source tool for annotating and discussing any web page or PDF.
• Wallabag - A self-hostable, open source read-it-later application that saves and archives articles.
• Karakeep - An open source, self-hostable bookmarking app (formerly Hoarder) with AI tagging and full-text search.

Learning and Community

• Write the Docs - A global community and conference series for documentation practitioners.
• r/PKMS - A community for discussing personal knowledge management systems.

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome! Please read the contribution guidelines first, and note the Code of Conduct.