Content revision 4e771eaf0390cc87b6c7c6fd8469f3508f6ceeec7119472e6c1ccf17e2e1e5d2

## Understanding what the client needed

A Structure-Preserving RAG Ingestion Pipeline
Source ID ragflow-pipeline:understanding-the-client-requirements
Original https://www.henryw.me/#/ragflow-pipeline#understanding-the-client-requirements

The assistant would find relevant passages in the client’s documents and give them to a language model to help answer a question, an approach known as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). My task was to prepare the documents for that process. The requirements covered paragraphs and tables continuing across pages, complex table structures, references to distant notes and remarks, and flowcharts stored as images. An answer could depend on a relationship within any of these, so those relationships needed to survive document processing. These functional requirements left the technical choices open. I needed to establish which existing tools could meet them, what additional processing was necessary, and how the combined solution would fit the client’s infrastructure and operating budget.

I brought the cases together in a controlled five-page document, so comparisons used the same input and could follow the evidence through to an answer.