XWiki
The What
WAISE (Wiki AI Search Engine) is a conversational AI search server developed by XWiki as part of the NGI Search initiative. It employs Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to combine retrieved content with AI-generated insights, delivering context-aware responses in natural language. Built on XWiki’s extensible platform, WAISE integrates with other CMS systems and external tools, offering secure and efficient knowledge management capabilities such as querying, content summarization, and transformation. Its design ensures compliance with user access rights, maintaining both flexibility and data privacy.
For What
WAISE was created to address the growing challenges of navigating large and complex knowledge bases, both within XWiki and beyond. As organizations rely on ever-expanding data repositories, finding relevant, actionable information can become a bottleneck. By integrating WAISE, XWiki users gain access to AI-enhanced tools that simplify workflows, provide instant answers to complex queries, and support multilingual environments. The project also aligns with XWiki’s vision of fostering open-source, ethical innovation by allowing to use both cloud based LLM services as self-hostable open weight and open source models.
THE REACH
WAISE is designed to benefit organizations of all sizes and across diverse sectors, including technology, education, healthcare, and public administration. Its compatibility with self- and cloud-hosted LLMs allows for adaptability to specific workflows and industry needs. Companies focused on privacy, secure collaboration, or multilingual knowledge management can leverage WAISE to enhance their operations. Additionally, its integration with the Matrix protocol brings conversational AI into real-time chat environments, making it particularly valuable for distributed teams and global communication.
THE MILESTONES
The NGI-funded WAISE project has made significant advancements in enhancing AI-powered search and collaboration. Key milestones include the integration of embedding-based semantic search, keyword search, and hybrid search techniques, which have significantly improved the accuracy and efficiency of information retrieval. The creation of a Matrix bot enabled real-time conversational AI linked to XWiki content, providing seamless integration into collaborative workflows.
Extensive benchmarking of open-source LLMs offered critical insights into their performance, guiding improvements in tasks such as question answering and summarization. Additionally, WAISE introduced a REST API for indexing content from external applications, enabling expanded functionality beyond XWiki. Secure authentication mechanisms were implemented to maintain user access controls during AI interactions. Moving forward, efforts are focused on enhancing usability, particularly simplifying the configuration UI to ensure WAISE is accessible to technical and non-technical users alike.