Knowledge base

A maintained collection of records and relationships designed to support retrieval, reference, or decision-making in a defined domain.

A knowledge base may live in one database or present a unified search over several systems. Its usefulness depends on source authority, coverage, dates, access controls, schemas, retrieval, and maintenance. Connecting a model to the collection creates an evidence path but does not force the generated answer to use the right record.

Builder example

Support, research, and internal assistants can retrieve policy, cases, and decisions from approved sources. Evaluate retrieval and answer support separately, preserve provenance, and prevent access controls from being flattened during indexing.

Common confusion: A knowledge base is the stored collection of records, while retrieval is the act of searching that collection to pull the relevant ones into an answer. You build and curate the knowledge base once; retrieval runs every time you ask a question.