The Underlay is a free and open source system for structuring, storing, and aggregating open, distributed graph data. Its goal is to make machine-readable public knowledge accessible to all as a public good.
Today, knowledge is organized and stored in diverse formats, mostly optimized to support the needs of a specific use case or a community of users. Infrastructure and policy are increasingly being driven by rich machine-readable knowledge graphs, but they are currently private censorable black boxes.
The Underlay is an open version of such a knowledge graph for public knowledge. It supports an ecosystem where knowledge is connected by distributed, open-source protocols. It provides a common interface for searching, accessing, vetting and building upon public knowledge from diverse, sometimes conflicting sources. It helps make public knowledge more useful by connecting it and making it easily accessible as a public good.
A member of the Knowledge Futures Group