AI Catalog Standard¶

The foundation for federated agentic resource discovery

ARD is built directly on top of the ai-catalog specification. The ai-catalog standard establishes the base artifact-agnostic data model, progressive trust layer, and verification rules that enable dynamic runtime agentic resource discovery.

Standard manifest location¶

A host advertises its agentic resources by publishing a well-known static JSON manifest at:

https://<publisher-domain>/.well-known/ai-catalog.json

This allows secure, decentralized, and cacheable ingestion by crawlers and discovery services worldwide.

Core envelope schema¶

A baseline ai-catalog.json manifest includes the following root elements:

specVersion: The version of the catalog format (e.g., "1.0").
host: Information about the entity operating the catalog (display name, DID/domain identifier).
entries: An array of individual agentic resource card definitions.
collections: Links to sub-catalogs or related departmental feeds.

Example baseline entry¶

{
  "specVersion": "1.0",
  "host": {
    "displayName": "Acme Systems",
    "identifier": "acme.com"
  },
  "entries": [
    {
      "identifier": "urn:ai:acme.com:tool:ocr",
      "displayName": "OCR Text Extractor",
      "type": "application/mcp-server+json",
      "url": "https://tools.acme.com/ocr/mcp.json",
      "description": "Extracts plain text and structured tables from scanned PDFs and PNGs."
    }
  ]
}

Progressive trust & compliance¶

The ai-catalog standard decouples complex security and compliance data from lightweight metadata, using a trustManifest object within each entry. This facilitates:

Workload identity: Binding agentic resources to SPIFFE IDs, decentralized identifiers (DIDs), or standard HTTPS domains.
Compliance attestations: Standardizing links to SOC2, HIPAA, GDPR, or ISO audits.
Provenance links: Recording lineage such as derived relationships (derivedFrom, publishedFrom) to enable supply-chain tracking.
Cryptographic signatures: Verifiable detached JWS signatures computed over the trust metadata to prevent tampering.