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Knowledge Source Categories

A Retrieval-Augmented Generation system can draw on two very different kinds of knowledge. External knowledge lives in public sources that anyone can read, while internal knowledge lives in private documents that require authentication and authorization. This diagram shows both domains and the central RAG system that retrieves from each based on the requesting user's permissions.

Interactive Demo

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Overview

The diagram is divided by a dashed boundary line into two domains:

  • External Knowledge (green, left): Public knowledge bases such as Wikipedia, ArXiv, news feeds, and Stack Overflow. These require no authentication - anyone can access them.
  • Internal Knowledge (blue, right): Private documents such as the company wiki, internal databases, email, and file shares. Access requires both authentication (proving who you are) and authorization (proving you are allowed to see it).

The RAG System (purple, center) sits above both domains with bidirectional arrows to each. At query time it decides which sources to retrieve from based on the user's identity and permissions, so two different users can ask the same question and receive answers grounded in different document sets.

Lesson Plan

  • Classify sources: Give students a list of knowledge sources and have them sort each into external/public or internal/private.
  • Discuss access control: Explain why internal knowledge needs authentication and authorization, not just one or the other.
  • Permission scenarios: Walk through how the same query could return different results for an executive versus a contractor.
  • Design exercise: Ask students to extend the diagram with a third domain (for example, partner/shared knowledge) and decide its access rules.

References