Make German Technical RAG Respect Machine Revisions

02A language model may still produce a convincing response.

03Design the system to recognise when those missing details prevent a reliable document selection.

04DSK's technical AI guidance describes retrieval-augmented generation as adding relevant information to a model through search.

05[1] Retrieval creates an opportunity to ground an answer, but your implementation must decide which material is eligible to be retrieved.

06Start with the equipment record and the approved document register.

07Attach product family, model, revision, language, effective status and access group.

08Keep unknown metadata visible.

09A document with an uncertain revision should not silently compete on equal terms with an approved current instruction for the identified machine.

02Include compound nouns, shop-floor abbreviations, historic part names and approved English equivalents.

03Distinguish a synonym from a nearby concept that should remain separate.

04Preserve identifiers and numerical expressions during extraction.

05A parser that breaks a drawing number, moves a minus sign or separates a value from its unit can damage the evidence before the model sees it.

06Keep tables and figure references connected to their explanatory text.

07PTB provides a German reference for the International System of Units, including its updated German SI brochure.

08[2] Use authoritative references where terminology requires them.

09The practical recommendation is to maintain a reviewed representation of units and symbols, rather than letting each generated answer choose its own formatting or conversion convention.

02A smaller approved set can be more useful than a large collection with contradictory revisions.

03The table below is an original gate for documents entering a technical assistant.

04Separate historical retrieval from current instruction.

05Engineers may need obsolete manuals to understand an old installed base, but the answer should explain that context.

06Hiding all older material can be as unhelpful as serving it without a revision warning.

02The repository contains two manuals with similar names.

03One covers the original controller; the other covers a retrofit installed only on some machines.

04The assistant first requests the machine identifier and controller version.

05It retrieves the matching manual and returns the relevant section with its revision.

06If the installed configuration cannot be established, it explains the missing information and routes the question to the service owner.

07The exercise should include an intentionally misleading file title and a familiar but wrong part synonym.

08Success means refusing the unsupported instruction while making the next step useful.

09It does not mean producing an answer to every question, and no live machinery should be used to discover whether an invented procedure was plausible.

02Include straightforward retrieval, conflicting revisions, missing identifiers, inaccessible documents and questions whose answers do not exist in the corpus.

03Assign an engineering reviewer to the expected outcome.

04Score whether the retrieved source applies, whether the answer stays within it and whether the citation lets a person inspect the evidence.

05Also score whether a refusal identifies the missing fact.

06A vague refusal can protect against one error while leaving the user stranded.

07There is a tradeoff between strict filtering and answer coverage.

08Track the questions blocked by poor metadata separately from those blocked by genuinely unavailable knowledge.

09The former may justify document repair; the latter may require an engineering decision or a new approved instruction.

10Increasing model confidence resolves neither problem.

02When an approved instruction changes, identify affected answer cases and review them.

03A periodic bulk upload can leave the assistant serving material that the document system has already superseded.

04Give users a route to report a mismatched source without editing the underlying instruction themselves.

05Record the question, cited document and reason for concern with appropriate access controls.

06The document owner should decide whether the issue is metadata, extraction, retrieval or the source content.

07Begin with one equipment family and a bounded question set.

08Establish the expected behaviour for uncertainty before expanding the corpus.

09The result should help engineers find applicable evidence faster while preserving the authority of the approved technical documentation and the people responsible for interpreting it.