# Knowledge and boundaries

> The knowledge Octy answers from, how its boundary is enforced in the engine, and how disclosure tiers separate public and internal knowledge.

Octy™ answers only from the knowledge its profile names, within the access of the person asking. The organisation’s documents are indexed and searched in its own account, and the boundary is enforced in the search.

## Knowledge

A profile names one or more **corpora**: indexed collections of documents that Octy may search. A corpus can be:

- **The organisation’s documents**: product documentation, policies, procedures, standards, support articles, contracts and guidance, indexed in the deployment.
- **Connected sources**: SharePoint, Confluence, Amazon S3, Google Drive and the other systems in the [connector catalogue](/connect/), synced into the deployment on their own schedules.
- **Uploaded collections**: files [uploaded](/connect/upload/) for a specific purpose.
- **The tenant’s LightHouse™ data**: for Octy in the LightHouse portal, which reads the tenant’s agents, runs, costs and approvals through the same read routes as the API, under the person’s role.
- **Published knowledge**: a public corpus, such as the regulation of a sector, curated and published for Octy to answer from.

Every corpus is indexed and searched inside the deployment, in the organisation’s account. The documents, passages and indexes are stored there and read in place. See [How retrieval works](/concepts/retrieval/) and [Knowledge bases](/concepts/knowledge-bases/).

## The boundary

The engine enforces the boundary outside the model’s prompt:

- **The profile’s corpora only.** A search runs only over the corpora the profile names. Other corpora in the same deployment are excluded.
- **The caller’s access.** Each document carries its access classification. The search applies the person’s access, taken from the identity provider’s sign-in, inside the query. Passages outside the person’s access are not retrieved.
- **The channel’s access.** Each channel can be limited to specific classes of document. For example, a Slack or Teams channel can be limited to internal documents for every person who asks there.
- **Retrieved text is evidence.** Passages reach the model inside sealed fences, as evidence to answer from. Instructions written in a document are not followed. See [MCP security](/security/mcp/) for the red-team suite that tests this.

The boundary is applied in the search, and the wording of a question cannot widen it.

## Disclosure tiers

Each profile has a **disclosure tier**:

| Tier         | Audience                                                          | Permitted knowledge                                                     |
| ------------ | ----------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Public**   | Anyone, on a public website                                       | Knowledge cleared for publication that has passed the publication guard |
| **NDA**      | Clients and prospects under a non-disclosure agreement, signed in | Knowledge cleared for readers under the agreement                       |
| **Internal** | The organisation’s staff, signed in through its identity provider | Internal knowledge, within each person’s access                         |

A public profile cannot hold an NDA or internal corpus. Atlantic’s own public Octy profiles answer only from knowledge that has passed the publication guard. For an Octy profile, the tier is checked when a profile is saved and again when it is published. A corpus is treated as published only when the deployment reports every document in it at the public tier. The deployment checks the tier again before it applies the profile, and for a public profile the search is limited to public documents.

## When the knowledge does not cover a question

If no passage in the profile’s knowledge is sufficiently relevant, Octy states that the knowledge does not cover the question. This happens before an answering model is called, and the cost of the answer is close to zero. Octy does not answer from a model’s general knowledge.

A question that matches the words of a document but not its facts reaches the model, which is instructed to state that the passages do not answer it. The answer is checked against its sources before it is sent. See [Evidence and question insights](/octy/evidence/).

## Keeping knowledge current

Connected sources sync on their own schedules. New and changed documents are indexed, and deleted documents are removed. A document deleted at its source is not retrieved after the next sync. See [How retrieval works](/concepts/retrieval/#when-something-is-deleted).

The knowledge picker on the Octy profiles page: choosing a profile’s corpora from the knowledge bases, connected sources and uploaded collections the organisation’s deployments report, each with its document count and publication state. [Question insights](/octy/evidence/#question-insights) list the questions the knowledge did not cover.

Source: https://docs.atlanticagenticlabs.com/octy/knowledge/