Knowledge base
Your documents, notes, and data in one place—so the AI can answer questions from your own content. No cloud; everything stays on your hardware.
What is a knowledge base?
A knowledge base is a structured collection of information your organisation uses every day: policies, procedures, project notes, manuals, contracts, or meeting summaries. In Local AI we mean two things: (1) the actual files and notes—often in Obsidian vaults, PDFs, or docs—and (2) the indexed version of that content that the AI searches when you ask a question.
When you add documents to a knowledge base and connect it to your Local AI stack, the model doesn’t rely only on its training. It retrieves relevant chunks from your data and uses them to answer. That’s RAG (retrieval-augmented generation): the AI grounds its replies in your own sources and can cite them.
How it works in Local AI
Documents & notes
You store content in folders, Obsidian vaults, or upload PDFs, DOCX, TXT, MD into a drive or RAG pipeline. The system ingests and chunks the text so it can be searched later.
Vector index
Chunks are turned into embeddings (numeric vectors). A vector store (e.g. Chroma) keeps them. When you ask a question, the system finds the most relevant chunks and passes them to the LLM with your query.
Open WebUI and other tools let you pick which knowledge base to query. You ask in natural language; the AI answers using only the retrieved passages (and its reasoning), so responses stay aligned with your data and stay private.
Why a local knowledge base?
- Answers from your data: Policies, project notes, and docs—not generic web knowledge.
- Citations: The AI can point to the exact file or passage it used, so you can check.
- Data stays on your machine: No sending internal docs to the cloud; full control and compliance.
- Multiple bases: Separate knowledge bases for different teams or projects; choose which one to query per chat.
Obsidian and Open WebUI
Obsidian is often your human-facing knowledge base: notes, links, and structure. Plugins (Smart Connections, Copilot) can connect it to your local LLM so the AI sees your vault. Open WebUI can use a separate RAG knowledge base (PDFs, docs) for chat—so you have both: a note-taking knowledge base in Obsidian and a queryable document base for RAG. We help you set up and scope both.
Obsidian for Local AI →Next steps
Want a knowledge base and RAG wired into your Local AI—documents, indexing, and citations—on your hardware? We can design and implement it for your team.
Talk about knowledge base & RAG