Show HN: Kiso, an open-source publishing engine for Open Knowledge Format
Kiso is an open-source publishing engine designed for the Open Knowledge Format, enabling users to create, manage, and publish structured knowledge content. It was released on Hacker News as a Show HN project.
Background
- Kiso is an open-source publishing engine designed for the "Open Knowledge Format" — a new file format that makes interactive articles, textbooks, and technical documentation that can be read in a web browser.
- The project is by Oak Invest, a venture firm focused on open-source and developer tools. It was posted on Hacker News ("Show HN"), which is where developers share side projects and startups.
- Interactive documents (combining text with live code, visualizations, or simulations) have become popular thanks to tools like Jupyter Notebooks (used in data science) and Observable (used for data journalism). Kiso aims to be a more general-purpose engine for this kind of content.
- Why it matters: most publishing tools lock content into proprietary formats (e.g., PDF, Substack, Notion). An open format that is both human-readable and machine-executable could let authors own their work and make it more interactive, but it faces the challenge of gaining adoption against established tools.