What are knowledge base items?

A knowledge base item is a single question and its answer. The knowledge base is made up of these items, and each one carries everything ResponseHub knows about that question: its status, whether it applies to your organisation, the answer itself, the policy text behind the answer, and the discussion your team has had about it.

Open an item by selecting it in the Knowledge Base table. Its details open in a panel beside the list.

Statuses

Every item has one of three statuses:

Status	What it means
Needs Input	The item needs a person to complete it.
Auto Answered	ResponseHub answered it from your sources. It still needs human approval.
Approved	A person has approved the answer. Only approved items are used to answer questionnaires and RFPs.

Approving an item is what puts it to work — an item sitting in Needs Input or Auto Answered is not yet used for answering questionnaires and RFPs.

To change a status, select the status badge at the top of the item panel, or select Approve to approve it outright.

The question

The question is shown at the top of the item and can be edited in place.

Explain this breaks the question down: what it is actually asking, why it matters, and how it is typically evidenced. Useful when a questionnaire uses language your team doesn’t.

Applicability

ResponseHub assesses whether a question applies to an organisation like yours, based on your account profile. The item shows one of Applicable, Not Applicable, or Not Checked.

Select View rationale to see the reasoning behind the decision. You can override the assessment by selecting the applicability badge.

The answer

The answer is the response that will be used when this question comes up. See writing and updating for how to edit, generate, and approve it.

References and confidence

The References card shows the passages from your sources that were used, each one badged:

Used in answer — the passage informed the answer
Used as answer — the passage was reused word for word, which is verbatim

Each reference carries a Relevance rating showing how well that passage matches the question. Passages that were retrieved but not drawn on are listed separately under Unused references. See references for more.

When there isn’t enough to answer from

Before answering from your sources, ResponseHub checks whether it found enough relevant policy text to work with. The card is badged Sufficient Context or Insufficient Context.

When the context is insufficient — nothing in your sources covers the question closely enough — the item shows a short explanation of what was missing instead of an answer. That usually means one of two things: the topic isn’t in your sources yet and wants a source importing, or it is a question your policies will never answer and wants a written answer of its own.

When there is enough context, the item shows a Confidence rating of Excellent, Very good, Good, Ok, or Low. Expand it to see why ResponseHub rated it that way. See confidence for how it is worked out.

Discussion

Discussion is where your team works out an answer together. Leave a comment, reply to a colleague, and resolve a comment once it is settled. Resolved comments stay available behind Show resolved.

Potential duplicates

The Potential Duplicates card lists other items that ask much the same thing. It stays empty until you run a duplicate check — see finding duplicates.

Audit history

Every change to an item is recorded. Expand Audit History on the item to see what changed, when, and who changed it.

Deleting items

Delete a single item with the delete icon at the top of its panel. To delete several, select their checkboxes in the Knowledge Base table and select Delete in the bar that appears at the bottom of the screen.