Whattheorganisationknows,withcitationsandlineage.
Knowledge answers questions about documents, standards, history and precedent. It is necessary and it is not sufficient — which is why it sits beside the ontology rather than instead of it.
The boundary
Knowledge is what the organisation knows. Ontology is what the organisation is, how its parts relate, and what may happen next. Retrieval is how knowledge is found; the ontology is what gives the answer a place to belong.
Capabilities
Semantic retrieval
Hybrid search over documents, records and prior decisions, combining embedding similarity with structured filters from the ontology.
Vector search
Managed vector indexes with residency guarantees, versioned embeddings and re-indexing that does not require an outage.
Document intelligence
Extraction from the formats enterprises actually hold: scanned drawings, inspection reports, contracts, correspondence and spreadsheets.
Citations
Every generated claim resolves to a source passage a reviewer can open. Answers without a resolvable citation are surfaced as such.
Lineage
Which source produced a fact, which version of it was current, and when it was last verified.
Memory
Durable context scoped to an object or a case rather than to a chat session, so a decision made last quarter is still available to the next one.
Freshness policy
Explicit rules about how stale a source may be for a given class of decision, and what happens when it is staler than that.
Access-aware retrieval
Retrieval respects the caller's data scope. An agent cannot receive a passage from a document it is not permitted to read.
Redaction
Sensitive spans can be removed before content reaches a model, with the redaction itself recorded in the evidence.
Access-aware retrieval is the control most often missing from otherwise well-built RAG systems. An index that ignores permissions is a permission bypass with a search box on it.
Whichlayeranswerswhichquestion
| Question | Answered by |
|---|---|
| What does the standard require in this situation? | Knowledge — retrieve and cite the passage |
| Which assets does this constraint affect? | Ontology — traverse relationships |
| Has this failure happened before, and what was done? | Both — incidents from the ontology, reports from knowledge |
| Is this operator permitted to approve this? | Control plane — policy against typed objects |
| What did we decide last time, and why? | Evidence — the recorded decision and its reasoning |
Questions
- Do we need to move our documents?
- Not necessarily. Content can be indexed in place where the source system supports it, which keeps the source of truth where its owners expect it to be.
- How do you stop the model inventing citations?
- Citations are resolved against the retrieved passages rather than generated as text. A claim whose citation does not resolve is flagged, not rendered as if it were sourced.
- Is retrieval enough for regulated decisions?
- Rarely on its own. Regulated decisions usually need the structured half: which objects are in scope, which rules apply, who owns the outcome. That is what the ontology and the control plane contribute.
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