NCP Core
Identity, versions, authorship, provenance, references, contributions, and portable narrative moments.
Open narrative interoperability
Narrative context,
made portable.
NCP carries authorial intent, provenance, and structured story information across writing tools, production workflows, archives, and AI systems.
{
"ncp_version": "0.0.0-development",
"document": {
"id": "ncp_document_001",
"created_at": "2026-08-15T12:00:00Z"
},
"story": {
"id": "story_001",
"title": "A Portable Story"
},
"profiles": [],
"extensions": [],
"payloads": {}
}What NCP is.
Narrative Context Protocol is an open, application-independent interchange standard for transporting narrative context, authorial intent, provenance, and structured story information across tools and workflows.
NCP is a transport format. It lets different applications exchange narrative information without requiring every tool to use the same internal model.
Architecture.
NCP separates a common envelope from separately declared narrative-system and workflow data.
Profiles
Separately governed fields and payloads for a declared narrative approach.
Extensions
Optional information added under an independent namespace without changing Core or another profile.
JSON serialization
The current machine-readable representation of an NCP document.
Bindings
Rules for embedding or referencing NCP within another standard or system.
NCP Core.
The narrative-system-neutral envelope. Core stays useful whether a document declares zero profiles or several.
Identity and version
Stable document and story identifiers plus explicit protocol versioning.
Authorship and provenance
Who contributed information, when it changed, and where it came from.
Portable references
Links to narrative, creative, or production objects maintained by other systems.
Opaque payloads
Declared profile and extension data that Core processors can preserve without interpreting.
Profiles and Extensions.
Additional systems use separately named and governed namespaces. One namespace cannot silently change another namespace's meaning.
example-profile: narrative-system information
example-interactive: interactive state references
studio-production: workflow-specific references
archive-notes: preservation metadata
NCP schema validation.
Open and self-service
Check document structure
Schema validation checks JSON syntax, required NCP fields, field types, identifier shapes, and the selected schema version.
A precise claim
Structure is not semantics
NCP schema validation confirms that a document is structurally well-formed. It does not determine whether a profile payload is complete, coherent, or semantically valid.
Developer Documentation.
Start with Core, declare profiles and extensions explicitly, preserve unknown payloads, and report each conformance layer by name.