The outcome
Answer from a governed corpus with traceable sources, explicit refresh rules, and tested unanswerable behavior.
Step by step
A workflow you can repeat.
- 01
Define source owners, readers, permissions, retention, freshness, expected questions, citations, and a benchmark with unanswerable cases.
- 02
Create a dedicated knowledge base, clean and deduplicate documents, remove secrets, and choose parsing and chunking for representative formats.
- 03
Configure embedding, retrieval, top-k, score threshold, reranking, and metadata filters while preserving source and access identifiers.
- 04
Attach retrieval to a test app and inspect retrieved chunks separately from answers for recall, stale data, injection, contradictions, and leakage.
- 05
Require source-backed responses and abstention, restrict app and API access, and test updates, deletions, monitoring, and index rollback.
Working standard
What good use looks like.
- Isolate corpora by access boundary.
- Evaluate retrieval separately from answers.
- Test refresh and deletion propagation.
Official references