OMC — the open standard for AI model documentation.
An Open Model Card (.omc) is a structured JSON document that describes an AI model from a practitioner's perspective — someone who is evaluating, comparing, tracking, or deploying third-party AI models.
This is different from existing model card formats, which are designed for model creators documenting their own models. OMC is designed for the people using those models: data scientists, ML engineers, architects, and technical decision-makers who need to track, compare, and govern the AI models in their organisation.
There is no open standard for practitioner-facing AI model documentation. Existing formats are:
- Creator-facing (Hugging Face YAML, Google's Model Card Toolkit) — designed for the people building models, not using them
- Infrastructure-facing (CNCF ModelPack) — designed for packaging and deployment, not documentation
- Proprietary (OpenAI system cards, NVIDIA Model Card++) — platform-specific, not interoperable
OMC fills the gap. It is:
- Open — the spec is public, MIT licensed, free for anyone to implement
- Self-hosted —
.omcfiles live on your machine, your data never leaves your control - Practitioner-first — designed for evaluation, comparison, and governance, not model publishing
- Simple — valid JSON, readable with any text editor, parseable with any language
- Extensible — a core schema with optional extension fields for specific industries or use cases
The current specification is at spec/omc-spec-v0.1.md.
The JSON Schema is at schema/omc-schema-v0.1.json.
Status: Draft. This is v0.1. The schema will evolve based on community feedback before a stable v1.0 release.
Open Model Cards use the .omc file extension. The contents are valid JSON conforming to the OMC schema.
See the examples/ directory for sample .omc files covering:
- A general-purpose frontier model (GPT-4o)
- A reasoning-focused model (Claude 3.5 Sonnet)
- An open-source model (Llama 3)
AI Model Cards is the reference implementation of the OMC spec — a self-hosted, single-file web application for tracking, comparing, and visualising AI models using .omc files.
→ omc.dev
This spec is in early draft. Contributions, corrections, and discussion are welcome.
- Open an issue to propose a new field or flag an error
- Open a PR with a suggested change to the spec
- Join the discussion in GitHub Discussions
Please read CONTRIBUTING.md before submitting.
The OMC specification is licensed under the MIT License.
Created and maintained by AlgoBroker.
Open Model Card specification — openmodelcard.org