NSF launches the Open Knowledge Network, a national open-data platform connecting more than 40 knowledge graphs to power the new wave of AI-enabled discovery
Built through the NSF Prototype Open Knowledge Network program and in collaboration with a broad coalition of federal partners, the network is now available for public use
The U.S. National Science Foundation announced today the launch of the NSF Open Knowledge Network (NSF OKN), a national open-data infrastructure that links 43 interconnected knowledge graphs and tens of billions of connected facts across health, the environment, justice, manufacturing, and national security. The network is live and open to the public at okn.us.
NSF OKN provides a structured, persistent, verifiable knowledge layer to complement contemporary artificial intelligence models, providing grounding of facts, attribution, and knowledge governance essential to critical AI applications in a number of fields. OKN's value goes beyond machines querying structured knowledge: Its deeper value provides AI systems with a shared, explicit, interoperable, and auditable representation of the world on which they are expected to reason and act.
Across science, government, and many key enterprise applications, valuable datasets sit in silos that are not accessible, interoperable, nor ready for use by AI systems. OKN makes federal and public data findable, connected, and machine-readable at a national scale. In its September 2026 statement on a new golden age of science, NSF named AI-ready datasets, next-generation scientific data infrastructure, and a national network of programmable cloud laboratories among its central investments, aligned with the Genesis Mission, the whole-of-government effort to harness AI for scientific discovery. OKN is a working example of the data layer that this vision requires. Where simply producing a plausible answer is no longer sufficient, and the user often needs to know more about the evidence, source, and other details, the NSF OKN provides a robust response.
"The NSF OKN began as an experiment. We asked whether independent teams could build one open knowledge network, and whether NSF and its partners could stand up national-scale infrastructure and sustain it," said Erwin Gianchandani, NSF Assistant Director for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships. "The answer is the network going live today. It is open, it is public, and it is already larger than what we originally funded thanks to the public and private partnerships that have formed."
OKN was built by the Prototype Open Knowledge Network program, initially a $26.7 million, 18-research-team effort launched in 2023, with core support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), National Institute of Justice (NIJ), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Each team built a knowledge graph in its own field, then connected it to the other knowledge graphs through a shared technical fabric. The result is a single federated network rather than 18 separate projects.
It proved successful and grew beyond the 18 initial projects. Federal partners invested their own resources to connect their data. NIH provided $2.5 million in supplements to integrate ten of its knowledge graph efforts, and NASA, USGS, and NOAA added data products including a coastal-zone digital twin and NASA's Earth-observing knowledge graph. Teams that were not part of the original award joined the federation, which now serves 43 graphs. Today the program has drawn active engagement from more than 12 federal agencies and realized over 90 cross-sector partnerships.
The network's distinctive result is cross-graph querying that answers questions no single database can. For example, linking supply-chain and manufacturing data maps cybersecurity exposure across more than 7,000 semiconductor products from 247 companies, and pairing contamination data with soil-productivity data connects environmental and agricultural questions that were previously separate.
OKN is built for everyone, not just researchers. A caseworker finding housing for a client, a community bracing for a flood, a company checking its software supply chain for a vulnerability — all these individuals can use the network. "What launches today is public infrastructure that agencies, researchers, and the public can use to answer questions that cross the boundaries between fields," Gianchandani said.
About NSF TIP
The NSF Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (NSF TIP) seeks to engage all Americans in accelerating critical and emerging technologies to advance U.S. competitiveness. The directorate partners across sectors to advance three strategies — accelerating critical and emerging technology, expanding the geography of American innovation, and building a competition-ready workforce. For more information about NSF TIP, visit nsf.gov/tip/latest.