Knowledge Cards: Structured Knowledge for AI Systems

Abstract

AI systems whose outputs inform real decisions, and increasingly consequential ones, require something that current documentation practice does not provide: a structured, inspectable representation of the knowledge they need to ground, contextualize, and reason about those decisions, ideally reviewed and signed off by a domain expert. Established documentation artefacts already capture important aspects of an AI system. Model cards describe how a system behaves, data cards describe what it was trained on, and system cards describe the risks of a deployed system. None of them addresses the layer between inputs and outputs, more precisely, the concepts a system holds, the relationships it models, and the patterns of reasoning it applies. For pattern-recognition tasks this gap is tolerable. For agentic AI, where systems act on their conclusions, it is the step that most often separates a promising proof of concept from an operational solution an organisation can rely on. This paper introduces the Knowledge Card, a structured artefact that captures validated knowledge about a single bounded concept in a form that experts can review, organisations can audit, and AI systems can reason over. For one concept, such as a specific failure mode, a compliance obligation, or a process decision, a Knowledge Card records the entities and relationships involved, the reasoning that connects them, the conditions under which that reasoning no longer holds, and the provenance of every claim, all grounded in a formal domain ontology and signed off by a domain expert. Initial prototype cards have been built in the energy and pharmaceutical domains. The schema is released as a public draft for community engagement.