Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD)

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: '0.23'
kind: standard
x-type: standards-body
x-category: Specification
x-host: null
x-host-structure: null
created: 2026-05-19 00:00:00+00:00
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: IssueTracker
  url: https://github.com/Agent-Card/ai-catalog/issues
- type: SecurityPolicy
  url: https://github.com/Agent-Card/ai-catalog/blob/main/SECURITY.md
- type: CodeOfConduct
  url: https://github.com/Agent-Card/ai-catalog/blob/main/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
- type: ContributionGuide
  url: https://github.com/Agent-Card/ai-catalog/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md
- 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/