Genval

What is Genval?

Genval LLC is the company behind the Kanonak Protocol, an open-source protocol for defining, versioning, and sharing semantic ontologies across distributed publishers. With Kanonak, anyone with a domain name can publish a typed schema, and anyone can import, validate, and reason over it without a central registry or gatekeeping. Publishers own their namespace at their own domain, and consumers pin versions using semantic versioning (semver) and resolve imports over HTTP. The protocol uses stable URIs of the form publisher/package@version/name, ensuring reliable references. Schemas are written in clean YAML, with classes, properties, and instances typed against core RDF/OWL/XSD vocabularies. Genval provides developer tools including the @kanonak-protocol/cli for validation and dependency resolution, and a VS Code extension for live feedback. A practical illustration of the protocol is Worldview, an open-source daily macro-market worldview published as versioned Kanonak snapshots. It features typed theses, machine-evaluable invalidation, and citation-backed evidence, demonstrating how the protocol handles a domain that changes daily. Kanonak is the operational form of Derivative Centric Development (DCD), a methodology authored by Genval. DCD ensures that specifications stay authoritative while downstream code, models, and integrations are derived from them. This approach allows AI to handle the derivation of most code from human-authored specs. The Genval console, where DCD was first proven, remains available, but the company's current public work focuses on Kanonak. Use cases include restructuring scattered analysis projects into clean services and models, and transforming Markdown specifications into a working ecommerce stack. Genval's technology is ideal for organizations needing distributed, versioned, and typed ontologies without central control. It is particularly useful for domains that require frequent updates, such as financial markets, research, and collaborative knowledge bases. Technical details include support for any domain, static HTTP origins, and semver pinning. For more information, visit kanonak.org to read the spec, browse Worldview's schemas, or publish your first package from a domain you already own.

Key Features

open source protocol semantic ontology versioning distributed publishing typed YAML schemas stable URI references semver dependency pinning CLI validation tools VS Code extension RDF/OWL/XS3D support domain owned namespaces

Who is it for?

ontology engineers, knowledge graph developers, data architects, semantic web researchers, domain publishers, schema maintainers, open, source contributors