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. 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 schema update workflows reproduce those developed by OCSF, and the OASF server is a derivative work of the OCSF schema server.
OASF defines a set of standards for agentic AI 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.
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. Formats other than OASF records, such as A2A Agent Cards and AI Catalog entries, can carry the same skills and domains through the discovery extension. 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.
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.
Once a schema version is released, no changes to that version of the schema are expected, except for non-breaking fixes such as documentation updates or minor bug corrections. Any deletions, additions, or structural changes made after a schema version is released will be part of the next schema version. This immutability policy ensures backward compatibility and stability for systems that depend on specific schema versions, while allowing the framework to evolve and improve over time through new version releases.
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.
The Directory MCP Server provides powerful capabilities to help create valid OASF agent records when configured with an LLM (such as in Cursor or other MCP-compatible IDEs). The MCP server exposes tools and prompts that enable LLMs to generate, validate, and refine OASF records with schema-aware assistance.
- Schema Discovery: Query OASF schema versions and navigate domains/skills taxonomy
- Record Generation: Automatically generate complete OASF records from your codebase
- Validation: Check records against the schema and iteratively fix validation errors
- Format Conversion: Import from MCP/A2A formats and export to other formats with automatic enrichment
To use the MCP server with an LLM for creating OASF records:
- Install the Directory MCP Server - See the MCP Server README for installation instructions
- Configure your IDE - Add the MCP server to your IDE's MCP configuration (e.g.,
~/.cursor/mcp.json) - Start Creating Records - Use natural language to ask the LLM to create, validate, or refine OASF records
Once configured, you can interact with the LLM using natural language:
- "Create an OASF record for this project" - Generates a complete record from your codebase
- "Validate this OASF record and fix any errors" - Checks and corrects validation issues
- "Import this MCP server configuration to OASF format" - Converts from other formats
The OASF schema server, an HTTP server to browse the schema and validate records against it, lives in
agntcy/oasf-server, along with its Helm chart.
It does not bundle a schema: deployments mount one, usually from the ghcr.io/agntcy/oasf-schema image this
repository publishes for every release.
See the announcement for what the split changed and how to upgrade.
You can access the OASF schema server, which is running the latest released schema, at schema.oasf.outshift.com.
Use Taskfile for all related development operations such as testing, validating and previewing the schema.
git clone https://github.com/agntcy/oasf.gittask server:up serves the local schema/ directory with the oasf-server release pinned in
.oasf-server-version, at localhost:8080:
task server:upThen run task server:reload in another terminal. It reloads the schema in the running server whenever a file under
schema/ changes. Set LOG_LEVEL (debug, info, warning, error) or SCHEMA_EXTENSION when running
task server:up to change the log level or load extensions, and OASF_SERVER_VERSION to try another server release.
task server:down stops the server.
task testruns the metaschema and proto checks, the pinned oasf-server's test suite against schema/ (with and without the
example extension), and a smoke test of the server image serving schema/. CI runs the same checks, so a schema change
that the server cannot load fails the pull request.
Each schema release is also published as ghcr.io/agntcy/oasf-schema:<schema version>, a data-only
image with the schema under /schema, for oasf-server
deployments to mount. To build one from the local schema/ directory:
task build:schema SCHEMA_IMAGE_TAG=devThe proto directory contains the Protocol Buffer (.proto) files defining our data objects and APIs.
The full proto module, generated language stubs and it's versions are hosted at the Buf Schema Registry:
https://buf.build/agntcy/oasf
Distributed under Apache 2.0 License. See LICENSE for more information. Copyright AGNTCY Contributors (https://github.com/agntcy)