# Stemmar

> Stemmar publishes the AKP specification and sells the hosted registry around it. AKP (AI
> Knowledge Package) is an open, vendor-neutral packaging format that turns organisational
> knowledge into portable, verifiable, AI-ready artifacts. Bundle knowledge. Control its
> distribution. Use it with any AI.

Two things share a name here and should not be confused. **AKP** is the format, the file
extension and the media type; it is open and vendor-neutral. **Stemmar** is the organisation,
the tools and the commercial platform. The correct phrasing is "the AKP specification, published
by Stemmar" — never "the Stemmar format". The separation is what the neutrality claim rests on.

An `.akp` file is self-contained. Reading, validating, inspecting, diffing, signing and verifying
one require no account, no network, no licence key and no server. The hosted registry is optional
infrastructure around a self-sufficient artifact, not a precondition for using one.

## Read this first if you are an agent

- [Using the akp tool](https://stemmar.com/AGENTS.md): how to install it, every command and what
  it does, and which four need a network. **Start here if you intend to run it.**
- [Full site content as plain text](https://stemmar.com/llms-full.txt): every concept the site
  explains, the command-line reference, and the public API — written for machine reading.
- [Public registry API](https://registry.stemmar.com/v1/packages): browsing published packages
  needs no credential. JSON, no authentication, no rate-limit registration.
- [OpenAPI contract](https://stemmar.com/openapi.json): the full HTTP surface, generated from the
  server's handlers.

Note that `https://stemmar.com` is a single-page application: fetching it returns an HTML shell,
and the human-facing pages are rendered by JavaScript on the client. Do not try to scrape them.
The three documents above carry the same content in a form you can read directly.

## Surfaces

- [stemmar.com](https://stemmar.com): Studio — the hosted registry, publishing, entitlements,
  continuous evaluation and the assistant. Commercial.
- [stemmar.org](https://stemmar.org): the AKP specification and its governance. Static HTML,
  readable without JavaScript.
- [registry.stemmar.com](https://registry.stemmar.com/health): the HTTP API behind Studio.

## Install the client

    curl -fsSL https://stemmar.org/install/install.sh | sh

Downloads the release archive for the running platform, verifies it against the published
SHA-256, and installs the `akp` binary. The current version is at
[/install/latest](https://stemmar.org/install/latest); archives live under
`/install/<version>/`.

The client is free and complete. There is no feature gating, licence key, account, activation or
telemetry gate in it.

## Command line

    akp build       Build a portable artifact from source documents
    akp inspect     Show what an artifact contains
    akp validate    Validate an artifact and produce a conformance report
    akp diff        Compare two artifacts
    akp keygen      Generate a local signing identity
    akp sign        Sign an artifact — works entirely offline
    akp verify      Verify a signature, from the file and a public key alone
    akp identify    Identify a file by byte signature, not by filename
    akp provenance  Trace a knowledge object back to its source
    akp fetch       Fetch a package from a registry and show what arrived
    akp deploy      Deploy an artifact to a runtime; local targets need no network
    akp publish     Publish an artifact to a registry
    akp login       Sign in to a registry and remember the credential
    akp logout      Forget the credential for a registry
    akp whoami      Report who this machine is to a registry

Everything above `fetch` works offline against a local file. `fetch`, `publish`, `login`,
`logout` and `whoami` are the only commands that need a registry — and `deploy` reaches one only
when it is given a coordinate rather than a path, which is how `akp deploy ./thing.akp` keeps
working with no network at all.

## Writing

All posts are reproduced in full at [llms-full.txt](https://stemmar.com/llms-full.txt), because
the rendered pages need a JavaScript runtime and these do not.

- [What is actually inside a knowledge package](https://stemmar.com/#/blog/what-is-in-a-knowledge-package):
  the plain explainer — one file, six things inside it, and why each is there. **Start here.**
- [Why did we create the spec?](https://stemmar.com/#/blog/why-we-wrote-a-specification): why the
  format is published as a specification separate from the company, what that cost, and the test
  we hold ourselves to.
- [Knowledge is not a pile of documents](https://stemmar.com/#/blog/why-bundle-knowledge): why
  provenance and distribution terms have to be properties of the knowledge rather than of the
  folder it sits in.

## Optional

- [Terms and Conditions](https://stemmar.com/llms-full.txt): reproduced in the full text.
- [Privacy Policy](https://stemmar.com/llms-full.txt): reproduced in the full text.