Google updates OKF with five new trust signals for data verification

Image credit: Search Engine Journal

Google updated its Open Knowledge Format (OKF) to version 0.2, introducing five new trust signals to enhance data verification and reliability for consumers globally.

The update aims to provide greater transparency regarding the origin, trustworthiness, and current status of information, addressing key questions about OKF bundles.

The five new trust signals are Provenance, Trust, Freshness, Lifecycle, and Attestation, according to an announcement published by Google.

Provenance utilizes a ‘sources’ field to record the origin of information, including objective credibility signals such as author, usage count, and the last modified date.

The ‘Trust’ signal incorporates ‘generated’ and ‘verified’ fields, which indicate who created a concept and whether it has been independently confirmed.

This allows users to filter information based on its verification status, Google reported.

Freshness and Lifecycle signals employ ‘stale_after’ and ‘status’ fields, respectively, to indicate when a concept requires re-verification or its current stage, such as draft, stable, or deprecated.

Attested Computation is a new concept type specifically designed to verify that a value was calculated according to a sanctioned method, rather than merely tracking its source.

Google stated that the update seeks to answer five critical questions about OKF bundles: What was this created from? How much should I trust it? Is it still true? Is it the current version? Was this number produced the way we said it must be?

The company said in a statement that OKF records signals for credibility inference by consumers, rather than assigning subjective scores.

Google has updated its GitHub repository to reflect these changes and published an explainer announcement detailing the new features.

Source: Search Engine Journal