# Overview

ELS Compass is a private AI compass for enterprise knowledge search. It is part
of the Energy Logserver product family.

Business teams use it to ask questions about contracts, procedures, policies,
reports and internal documentation, and to get answers that cite the document
passages behind them. Documents, indexes and answers stay inside infrastructure
the customer controls. Normal product operation does not require an external AI
API.

## What Problem It Solves

Employees who need an answer from internal documents have two bad options: read
through the documents by hand, or paste sensitive content into a public chatbot.
The first is slow. The second leaks knowledge the organisation is obliged to
protect.

ELS Compass replaces both with a governed knowledge workspace. Documents are
ingested into a local index, questions are answered from retrieved evidence, and
every answer points back to the passages it used.

## Core Capabilities

| Capability | What it gives you |
| --- | --- |
| Document ingestion | PDF, DOCX, CSV, Markdown and TXT files are parsed, chunked, summarised, embedded and indexed. |
| Workspaces | Teams, projects, customers and data domains stay separated, with their own documents and conversations. |
| Hybrid retrieval | Semantic relevance and classic keyword search run against a private ELS/OpenSearch index. |
| Grounded answers | Responses are generated from retrieved evidence and carry citations to the source passages. |
| Conversation history | Questions, answers and citations stay scoped to the workspace they belong to. |
| RBAC | Product access and workspace membership are enforced at the backend API level. |

## How It Works

The workflow stays simple for business users while the platform handles
ingestion, indexing, retrieval, answer generation and permissions underneath.

1. **Connect knowledge.** Documents enter a selected workspace and become
   controlled, searchable business knowledge.
2. **Index privately.** Content is parsed, structured, chunked and indexed in a
   customer-controlled environment.
3. **Ask securely.** Users ask in natural language, and the system searches only
   the knowledge their role permits.
4. **Verify the answer.** The response arrives with citations, so a reader can
   check the evidence immediately.

For what happens inside each step, see [Architecture](../03-0-0-Architecture/03-0-0-Architecture.md).

## Permission Model

Product access and workspace access are two separate questions.

Product entitlements decide whether a person may enter ELS Compass at all:

| Entitlement | Meaning |
| --- | --- |
| `aibs-access` | May enter the product. |
| `aibs-admin` | May administer product users, and only when combined with `aibs-access`. |

Workspace roles decide what a person may do inside a given workspace:

| Role | Scope |
| --- | --- |
| Owner | Full control. Deletes workspaces, manages owners, configures access and members. |
| Admin | Manages workspace state, documents, and non-owner members. Renames and archives workspaces. |
| Member | Uploads and processes documents, asks questions, uses history and citations. |
| Viewer | Reads workspace state and asks questions. No file or role management. |

A product administrator does not automatically get access to every workspace.
Workspace visibility comes from workspace membership. Details are in
[Security](../08-0-0-Security/08-0-0-Security.md).

## Deployment Shape

The API, retrieval index, ingestion workers, parsing, retrieval and answer
generation all run inside customer-controlled infrastructure. GPU workers are
optional and used for heavier workloads.

Licensing is not metered per token, so a question does not turn into a variable
expense.

## Where To Go Next

| You want to | Read |
| --- | --- |
| Install the platform | [Installation](../02-0-0-Installation/02-0-0-Installation.md) |
| Understand the internals | [Architecture](../03-0-0-Architecture/03-0-0-Architecture.md) |
| Configure a deployment | [Configuration](../04-0-0-Configuration/04-0-0-Configuration.md) |
| Use the product day to day | [User Guide](../05-0-0-User_guide/05-0-0-User_guide.md) |
| Run and maintain it | [Operations](../06-0-0-Operations/06-0-0-Operations.md) |
| Integrate with it | [API](../09-0-0-API/09-0-0-API.md) |