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Open Agentic Schema Framework

The Open Agentic Schema Framework (OASF) is a standardized schema system for defining and managing AI agent capabilities, interactions, and metadata. It provides a structured way to describe agent attributes, capabilities, and relationships using attribute-based taxonomies. The framework includes development tools, schema validation, and hot-reload capabilities for rapid schema development, all managed through a Taskfile-based workflow and containerized development environment. The OASF serves as the foundation for interoperable AI agent systems, enabling consistent definition and discovery of agent capabilities across distributed systems.

OASF is highly inspired from OCSF (Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework) in terms of data modeling philosophy but also in terms of implementation. The server is a derivative work of OCSF schema server and the schema update workflows reproduce those developed by OCSF.

Features

OASF defines a set of standards for AI agent content representation that aims to:

  • Define common data structure to facilitate content standardization, validation, and interoperability.
  • Ensure unique agent identification to address content discovery and consumption.
  • Provide extension capabilities to enable third-party features.

Key Concepts

At the core of OASF is the record object, which serves as the primary data structure for representing collections of information and metadata relevant to agentic AI applications.

OASF records can be annotated with skills and domains to enable effective announcement and discovery across agentic systems. Additionally, modules provide a flexible mechanism to extend records with additional information in a modular and composable way, supporting a wide range of agentic use cases.

Schema Expansion and Contributions

The Open Agentic Schema Framework (OASF) is designed with extensibility in mind and is expected to evolve to capture new use cases and capabilities. A key area of anticipated expansion includes the definition and management of Skills, Domains and Modules for AI agentic records.

We welcome contributions from the community to help shape the future of OASF. For detailed guidelines on how to contribute, including information on proposing new features, reporting bugs, and submitting code, please refer to our contributing guide.

OASF can be extended with private schema extensions, allowing you to leverage all features of the framework, such as validation. See the relevant section in the contributing guide for instructions on adding an extension to the schema. An OASF instance with schema extensions can be hosted, allowing you to use your own schema server for record validation.

Alternatively, records can be extended by adding arbitrary JSON objects to the modules list, using module names that do not conflict with existing OASF modules. However, this approach is the least recommended, as validation will be skipped for these modules if the record is validated against the standard OASF schema.

A convenient way to browse and use the OASF schema is through the Open Agentic Schema Framework Server hosted by Outshift by Cisco.

To deploy the server either locally or as a hosted service, see the server's guide for more information.

See Creating an Agent Record for more information on the Agent Record.

The current skill set taxonomy is described in Taxonomy of AI Agent Skills.