Government & Public Sector

AI Knowledge Base for Government: Traceable Answers, Data Stays Inside

Government knowledge lives in policy documents, service guides, OA attachments and line-of-business systems, and the same question often gets different answers in different departments. Counter staff have minutes to explain eligibility, required materials and processing time. Hotline agents field spoken, messy questions. Every answer has to point back to a specific article of a specific document, and when a policy is revised, the old wording keeps circulating.

The platform ingests policy documents, normative documents, service guides, official correspondence and archived records, isolates each department in its own knowledge space, and retrieves the exact passage with hybrid search plus ReRank. The model answers only from those passages and links every citation. Everything runs on the e-government extranet or an isolated network, with local model inference, so no data leaves your domain.

Where it breaks

  1. Policies change faster than answers

    The same service item is described differently across departments and document vintages, so counter and hotline staff pick a version from memory. After a new policy lands, outdated guides keep circulating in systems and printed handouts, and a wrong answer turns straight into a complaint.

  2. Guides scattered across systems and PDFs

    Eligibility, materials, timelines and fees live in a service-item database, departmental portals, line-of-business systems and scanned PDFs, with several versions of the same checklist. Finding the current one means opening four or five places, then calling a supervisor when it still cannot be found.

  3. Knowledge must be shared and walled off

    Police, human resources, healthcare and tax desks need one consistent answer, but the source material is sensitive and cannot be opened across departments at will. Share everything and you risk a leak; isolate everything and citizens get bounced between windows, while leadership still expects a single shared wording.

  4. Colloquial questions miss formal wording

    Citizens ask “does my situation qualify?” while the document says “where any of the following conditions apply” — no words in common. Keyword search returns nothing, agents paraphrase from memory, and afterwards nobody can reconstruct which step produced the wrong answer.

How RatioMax responds

  • On-premise deployment, data never leaves

    The four core services deploy on Docker Compose or Kubernetes inside your e-government extranet, intranet or an isolated network. Models can run locally through Ollama or an internal inference gateway, and each knowledge base can bind its own private bucket. Parsing, embedding and retrieval all happen inside your domain, with no document content sent to the public internet.

    Platform capability: On-premise deployment

  • Every answer links back to source

    Every answer carries a clickable citation to the specific passage, not just the document title. Hybrid retrieval pulls candidates with both vectors and keywords, ReRank orders them, and the model composes its reply from those passages only, which keeps wording from one file out of another. Auditors can open the cited passage and check it directly.

    Platform capability: Citation traceability

  • Space-level RBAC and audit trails

    Content is organized around knowledge spaces. Four-level RBAC reaches down to an individual knowledge base, departments are isolated by default, and any cross-department sharing has to be granted explicitly by an administrator. Queries, retrievals, uploads and denied attempts are written to per-space audit logs, and OIDC single sign-on ties every entry to a real identity.

    Platform capability: Space-level RBAC, audit logs

  • Keeping knowledge current as policy changes

    Guides and normative documents keep version snapshots, line-level diffs and rollback, so a new revision goes live while the one it replaced stays searchable and answers resolve to the version in force. Feishu wikis and scheduled RSS feeds can sync on a timetable, and a browser extension captures policy pages directly instead of relying on copy-paste.

    Platform capability: Version snapshots and rollback

Deployment scenarios

  • Counter answers and service item lookup

    An agent types the citizen's own words and gets eligibility, materials, timeline and fee basis back, each with the policy passage beside it. Change a service item once and every window sees the same version.

  • Hotline scripts and knowledge tickets

    When an agent cannot find an answer mid-call, the question becomes a knowledge ticket routed to the owning division. The approved reply and the document behind it are filed together, so the next identical call resolves immediately.

  • Structuring official documents and scans

    Notices, replies, letters and minutes are parsed with their heading hierarchy and issue dates intact; scans go through OCR and complex-layout PDFs through a layout-aware loader, so retrieval lands on the clause rather than the file.

  • Ramping new staff without shadowing

    Experienced staff write their judgement calls down as structured entries, filed next to the documents that justify them. New hires open the space for their post, ask once, and get the answer with its source instead of shadowing a mentor for a quarter.

Terms and knowledge entities

Normative document
A document issued by an administrative body under statutory authority that creates generally binding rules and serves as a primary basis for answering service inquiries.
Service guide
The published description of a service item, listing its name, eligibility, required materials, processing time and fees; the shared reference for counter intake and online filing.
Unified online government services
The practice of consolidating service items from multiple departments behind a single online entry point, with one login, reusable materials and trackable progress.
Service item attributes
The standardized fields of a service item — name, eligibility, materials, processing time and fees — used to keep wording consistent across systems.
12345 public service hotline
The unified public-service hotline number in each locality, handling inquiries, complaints, suggestions and requests and routing them to the responsible department.
Official document format
The layout standard for Party and government documents, covering header, body and record sections, fonts and sizes; the current national standard is GB/T 9704.
Data classification and grading
The practice of grading data by sensitivity and impact, then applying controls proportionate to each level; a prerequisite for sharing, opening and security review of government data.
Secrecy review
A review step before publication that checks whether information touches state or working secrets or sensitive content; the outcome decides whether it may be released.
Unified identity authentication
A mechanism by which a government body manages identities centrally so one account signs into many systems, usually over OIDC or SAML — also the starting point for knowledge-base permissions.

These definitions are also exposed structurally so search engines and AI engines can read and cite the domain concepts accurately.

Industry questions

Our intranet is physically isolated from the internet. Can this still be deployed?
Yes. With no internet egress, the four core services install from offline images on a single Docker Compose host or a Kubernetes cluster, with models served by a local Ollama instance or your own inference gateway. License files and update packages are delivered offline too, so operations only need one jump host inside the intranet.
During operation, can document or query content leave our environment?
No. Parsing, chunking, embedding, retrieval and generation all run inside your environment, against a self-hosted vector store such as pgvector, Milvus or Qdrant, with object storage bound to a private bucket. Outbound calls happen only if you deliberately configure an external model API, and even then access can be limited per space and logged.
How do we keep one department from seeing another's material?
Isolate by space: each department gets its own knowledge space, four-level RBAC reaches down to a single knowledge base, and cross-department sharing has to be granted explicitly rather than defaulting open. Every query, retrieval, upload and denied attempt lands in that space's audit log, tied to an account and a timestamp through SSO.
Policy documents change constantly. How do we make sure counters and hotlines use the current version?
Treat every document as a versioned object: new revisions go live while old ones stay searchable, answers resolve to the version in force, and the editor offers line-level diffs and one-click rollback with a record of who changed what. Upstream sync from Feishu wikis and scheduled RSS feeds cuts the manual lag.
If an answer is wrong and someone is held accountable, can the system show which document it came from?
Yes. Every answer carries a clickable citation to the passage, not just the file name, and the response record keeps the retrieved candidates, the ReRank order, the exact context sent to the model and the model output. W3C cross-service tracing lets you replay a single answer end to end during an audit.
We already run an OA system and unified identity authentication. Can they be integrated?
In most cases you integrate rather than replace. The platform supports OIDC SSO, so your existing unified identity provider keeps working and departments and posts sync from the org tree. Outbound REST APIs and the MCP tool package let OA to-dos, portals or ticketing systems call retrieval and Q&A and render results in their own UI.
How long from deployment to the first knowledge bases going live?
Most of the calendar goes to content, not installation. Deployment takes days on a single host or cluster, and SSO plus object storage add a few more; the real variable is how many service items you start with, who validates the old guides and how clean the scans are. Start with one high-volume item or one hotline desk, then roll out by department.
Some paper archives from a decade ago exist only as scanned images. Are they usable?
Yes, within the limits of scan quality. Images and scans go through OCR while complex-layout PDFs are parsed with layout reconstruction for reading order and tables, and results can be corrected by hand before indexing. Badly skewed, blurry or incomplete paper should be rescanned first, or retrieval accuracy will drop noticeably.

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