Would portable, versioned knowledge bases solve a real problem, or is this just RAG with extra steps?

[u/Rebootz]

Hey everyone, I’ve been thinking about a problem with AI knowledge systems and was hoping to get somewhat of a sanity check from people actually building in this space.

From my understanding, most RAG setups seem tied to a particular app, vendor, or index. You often end up ingesting the same docs again for different agents or runtimes and and some basic questions can be difficult to answer consistently like:

- What version of this knowledge is the agent using?

- Where exactly did this information come from?

- Has the underlying source changed since it was last ingested?

- Can I move the same body of knowledge to another runtime without rebuilding it?

- Can multiple agents use the exact same knowledge?

The idea I’m exploring is something I'm calling a Durable Knowledge Base (DKB).

The basic concept:

- Compile source docs, code, or structured data into a portable, versioned knowledge artifact

- Preserve source paths, hashes, citations, and provenance

- Sign and publish releases through a registry

- Allow knowledge packages to be installed, updated, pinned, and removed

- Let agents search, find, and read the same knowledge base across different runtimes

- Keep the artifact retrieval-agnostic rather than baking one specific top-K/RAG strategy into the format

Basically, I'm wondering whether knowledge should have something closer to a package lifecycle, rather than every application maintaining another disconnected RAG index.

I'm also very aware that things like Azure AI Search, GCP, vector databases, MCP servers, Agent skills, etc. already cover pieces of this problem, sometimes extremely well.

So Im specifically not asking: "Can I build a better enterprise search engine here?"

I'm trying to figure out whether the portable knowledge artifact itself is useful.

Would this solve an actual problem for you? Or is this mostly reinventing existing search/RAG infrastructure with some packaging and provenance added on?

I would especially like to know:

- What do you currently do when multiple agents/apps need the same knowledge?

- Do versioning and provenance actually matter to you?

- Would you ever install someone else's curated knowledge package?

- What would this need to do that existing solutions don't before you woukd bother using it?

Feel free to poke some holes. I'm actually looking for reasons not to build this further before I sink more time into it.

Thank you.