Welcome to the DocLang community!
This is the starting point for becoming a contributor — improving the specification, extending docs, giving talks, building reference implementations, and more.
DocLang is an open, AI-native data format for representing the content, structure, layout, and governance of documents. The goal is to provide a single, standardized abstraction layer between unstructured documents (PDF, images, audio-visual, scanned files, etc.) and the AI systems that operate on them — analogous to what PDF did for printing, or what JSON did for data interchange.
DocLang explicitly preserves both semantic meaning (headings, paragraphs, tables, lists, formulas, code) and geometric layout (page coordinates, regions, reading order) in a single representation, and embeds enforceable governance controls (privacy limits, extraction scopes, model-training permissions) directly into the document.
The standard is being developed as an open consortium effort with the intent of ISO standardization.
DocLang is a multi-vendor consortium effort. See MEMBERSHIP.md for participation levels for organizations and roles for individuals. Founding members are listed in the Charter. Current committers and the Technical Steering Committee are in GOVERNANCE.md.
Register your organization as an Adopter or Contributor.
Adopters: (none registered yet)
The initial draft of the DocLang specification originated from research by the AI for Knowledge team at IBM Research Europe – Zurich, building on prior work in the Docling open-source project. It has since been opened up as a vendor-neutral standard developed by the founding members.
The Charter, governance, and IP Policy cover project scope, day-to-day operations, and patent and contribution licensing — relevant for any ISO-track standard.
The Technical Steering Committee (TSC) meets regularly. Meeting notes are kept in steering-committee/meeting-notes/.
The TSC maintains the overall DocLang roadmap. A public roadmap document will be published in this repository; until then, see steering-committee meeting notes.
DocLang is driven by participating organizations, contributors, and the wider community. Ways to get involved:
- Specification work — propose changes, raise issues, and review pull requests on the primary DocLang repository.
- Reference implementations — build or contribute to parsers, validators, and converters.
- Documentation, examples, tutorials — there is always room for clearer onboarding material.
- Adoption stories — talks, blog posts, and case studies help the standard mature.
If you are looking for a first issue, search the primary DocLang repository for the help wanted label.
Please follow the process described in SECURITY.md. Do not report security issues through public GitHub issues.
For general questions and design discussion, please use the discussions section of the primary DocLang repository.