The CmapTools program, and concept mapping in general, have seen a steady growth in usage in the last few years. With new users come new requirements and needs for the software that we can’t always satisfy. Until now, the CmapTools architecture has been relatively closed to third party developers. In this paper we report on a new open architecture, KE (Knowledge Exchange Architecture), that provides the data and procedural framework to allow third party developers to design programs that interact with the CmapTools suite of programs. KEA consists of a portable, standard file format for data exchange (CXL), and a set of protocols for retrieving, storing, and manipulating Cmap information. We also describe how KEA was implemented and provide three sample client-server applications illustrating the steps we have taken toward the completion of this implementation.