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An Architectural Style for Human–AI Information Architecture
POOKA defines a conceptual model in which information, semantics, governance and behavior are organized explicitly, allowing humans and AI systems to collaborate from a shared architectural foundation.
Version 0.3Status DraftDate July 2026Author Maarten Meijer
The architectural challenge¶
Many current AI workflows reconstruct context during every interaction. Prompts are used to establish roles, context, behavioral expectations, terminology and relevant knowledge at runtime. While this provides considerable flexibility, it also makes collaboration dependent on prompt quality, repetition and conversational continuity. Context remains transient, semantics remain implicit, and knowledge is difficult to reuse consistently across domains, tools and AI models.
POOKA interprets the growing importance of prompt engineering not as an architectural solution, but as an architectural symptom: it suggests the absence of persistent structures capable of representing meaning, context, governance and behavior independently of individual conversations.
The architectural challenge addressed by POOKA is therefore not how to create better prompts, but how to design information environments in which prompts become consumers of architecture rather than its primary source.
POOKA does not define software, programming models, storage technologies or implementation frameworks. It defines a design philosophy for organizing information independently of AI models, applications and technical implementations.
Read the Design PaperThe complete paper, chapter by chapter, in its canonical order. Explore the ArchitectureThe Knowledge, Governance and Behavior layers, and how they connect. View Core ConceptsThe twelve architectural concepts and their definitions. DownloadThe Markdown source, the bibliography and citation information. GitHub RepositoryThe canonical source of the paper, open for review and discussion.
About the name¶
The name POOKA originally stood for Personal Object-Oriented Knowledge Architecture.
The concept originated from the practical challenge of organizing personal knowledge to enable more effective collaboration with AI. As the underlying concepts evolved, the central question gradually shifted from "How should I organize my own knowledge?" to "How should information be architected so that humans and AI can collaborate through a shared semantic structure?"
Although the original acronym reflects the historical origin of the work, it no longer defines its scope. Today, POOKA refers to the architectural style itself.
The origin of the name, in full
Status¶
POOKA is an architectural philosophy emerging from practical experimentation with Human–AI collaboration. It is not a scientific theory, formal standard or industry specification. The concepts presented in the paper are design proposals derived from practical observation, iterative refinement and architectural reasoning. They have not been empirically validated through controlled scientific research and should not be interpreted as established facts.
Adopting POOKA does not guarantee better AI performance, improved knowledge quality or organizational success. POOKA provides an architectural foundation rather than a guarantee of outcomes.
An invitation¶
This paper should be read as a design paper: an invitation to discussion, implementation, validation and further evolution.
Whether POOKA ultimately proves valuable will not be determined by the paper alone, but by its ability to support practical implementations, encourage architectural dialogue and evolve through continued application and critical evaluation.
Reviews are performed chapter by chapter, in Pull Request style. If you would like to challenge a concept, propose a refinement or record an architectural decision, the repository is the place to do it. The About page describes how the paper is written and reviewed.