The OpenPGP community wants to empower its users, and therefore we consider it of the utmost importance that we do not build black boxes that you, our users, merely use and are beholden to. To this end, this site documents the concepts of OpenPGP, and details the structure of OpenPGP data.
What is OpenPGP?
First and foremost, OpenPGP is a standardized way to handle and transport cryptographic objects like signatures or keys. To transport a signature from one agent to another, it is serialized into a sequence of bytes by the sender, and de-serialized by the recipient.
Standardization is vital to this process. It enables interoperability between different implementations, and ensures you that you can still access encrypted data, like backups, in the years to come. OpenPGP is defined in the Internet Standard RFC4880. Standardization via the IETF may be a slow process, but this process ensures that you can work with your OpenPGP data across different programs and platforms.