aid: agentic-resource-discovery url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/agentic-resource-discovery/refs/heads/main/apis.yml name: Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) specificationVersion: 0.20 kind: standard x-type: standards-body x-category: Specification x-host: null x-host-structure: null created: 2026-05-19T00:00:00.000Z modified: 2026-07-31 position: Producing access: 3rd-Party description: >- Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) is a proposed open standard for the discovery layer that sits in front of every agentic protocol — the step before invocation, where a client asks "what is available for this task?" and gets back a ranked set of MCP servers, agent cards, skills, workflows and APIs it could use. Publishers describe their resources once in an AI Catalog manifest at /.well-known/ai-catalog.json on their own domain, anchored by a urn:air: URN derived from that domain; independent discovery services crawl those manifests and expose them through a small REST interface whose only mandatory endpoint is POST /search. It deliberately does not execute anything — MCP, A2A and OpenAPI keep that job — and it deliberately does not try to be the one registry, inverting the submit-to-a-registry model in favour of publish-to-your-own-domain. Published as a v0.9 draft proposal on 28 May 2026 under Apache 2.0 by three authors at Microsoft, Google and Hugging Face, with a contributors wall of eleven organizations. It has no foundation, no charter, no participant roster and no working groups; it does have nine public architecture decision records and an official conformance CLI. This repo profiles it as a coalition with artifacts, and measures the distance between the specification and the endpoint. tags: - Agentic Resource Discovery - ARD - AI Catalog - Agent Discovery - Discovery - Well-Known URI - Media Types - Federation - MCP - A2A - Agent Skills - Standards - Standards Body - Specification - Machine Readability image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/agentic-resource-discovery.png maintainers: - FN: Kin Lane email: info@apievangelist.com X: apievangelist url: https://apievangelist.com apis: - aid: agentic-resource-discovery:ard-registry-api name: ARD Registry API description: >- The discovery interface a conformant Agent Registry exposes. POST /search is the only mandatory endpoint and takes a natural-language `text` query plus optional structured `filter`, returning catalog entries ranked 0-100 by semantic relevance. POST /explore returns facet aggregations over the matched set, GET /agents is deterministic paged browsing. This is the standard's own contract, not an implementation of it — the OpenAPI declares no server, because every registry is its own host, discovered through an application/ai-registry+json entry in a manifest. humanURL: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/spec/ tags: - Discovery - Search - Federation properties: - type: OpenAPI url: openapi/_original/ard-discovery-openapi.yml - type: Specification url: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/spec/ - type: Documentation url: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/how_ard_works/ - type: TestSuite url: conformance/README.md - aid: agentic-resource-discovery:ai-catalog-manifest name: AI Catalog Manifest description: >- The publishing half of the standard — the JSON manifest a domain serves at /.well-known/ai-catalog.json declaring who the host is and what agentic resources it offers, each entry typed by media type, identified by a domain-anchored urn:air: URN, and carrying an optional trustManifest for identity, compliance attestations, provenance and a detached JWS signature. Defined upstream by the ai-catalog project and extended here with discovery attributes. This is the artifact an API provider actually has to write. humanURL: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/ai_catalog_spec/ tags: - Discovery - Metadata - Well-Known URI properties: - type: JSONSchema url: json-schema/ai-catalog.schema.json - type: Specification url: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/ai_catalog_spec/ - type: Documentation url: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/how_to_publish/ - type: SourceCode url: https://github.com/Agent-Card/ai-catalog common: - type: Website url: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org - type: Specification url: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/spec/ - type: SourceCode url: https://github.com/ards-project/ard-spec - type: GitHubOrganization url: https://github.com/ards-project - type: License url: https://github.com/ards-project/ard-spec/blob/main/LICENSE - type: Contributing url: https://github.com/ards-project/ard-spec#contributing - type: Participants url: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/contributors/ - type: Governance url: governance/agentic-resource-discovery-governance.yml - type: Conformance url: conformance/agentic-resource-discovery-conformance.yml - type: TestSuite url: https://github.com/ards-project/ard-spec/tree/main/conformance - type: ReferenceImplementation url: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/ref_implementations/ - type: Adopters url: adoption/agentic-resource-discovery-adoption.yml - type: Adoption url: adoption/agentic-resource-discovery-adoption.yml - type: People url: people/agentic-resource-discovery-people.yml - type: Companies url: companies/agentic-resource-discovery-companies.yml - type: Leads url: leads/agentic-resource-discovery-new-company-leads.yml - type: Repositories url: repositories/agentic-resource-discovery-repositories.yml - type: Releases url: releases/agentic-resource-discovery-releases.yml - type: Contributors url: contributors/agentic-resource-discovery-contributors.yml - type: WorkingGroups url: working-groups/agentic-resource-discovery-working-groups.yml - type: Taxonomy url: taxonomy/agentic-resource-discovery-taxonomy.yml - type: Glossary url: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/glossary/ - type: FAQ url: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/faq/ - type: GettingStarted url: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/get_started/