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Data Engineering for AI Applications

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The pipelines behind RAG and LLM features: ingestion, parsing, embedding, indexing and freshness.

Editorial team 1 min read

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AI applications need data pipelines just as analytics does, with some new components.

Ingestion

Connect to document stores, wikis, ticketing systems, databases and websites. Capture permissions and metadata along with content.

Parsing

Extract clean text and structure from PDFs, Office files, HTML and images.

Chunking and Embedding

Split documents into chunks and generate embeddings, recording the model and version used.

Indexing

Load chunks, embeddings and metadata into vector or hybrid search indexes.

Freshness

  • Incremental updates when documents change.
  • Deletion when sources are removed.
  • Permission sync.

Re-Processing

When chunking rules or embedding models change, re-process the corpus. Design pipelines for it.

Quality Monitoring

Track parsing failures, empty documents, duplicate content and index size.

Structured Data for AI

Clean, well-documented tables with clear definitions let AI assistants answer data questions accurately.

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