Indexing Pipeline

Indexing Pipeline is the end-to-end workflow that ingests raw data—PDFs, web pages, logs—cleans and transforms it, then writes optimized records into a search or vector index for fast retrieval. Steps typically include extraction (loaders pull files or stream APIs), preprocessing (OCR, language detection, de-duplication), chunking (splitting text into overlap-aware passages), enrichment (embedding vectors, tagging metadata, adding access controls), and persistence to Elasticsearch, Pinecone, or Chroma. Pipelines run in batch via Airflow or stream with Kafka, emitting lineage logs and quality metrics such as document count, embedding coverage, and error rate. Incremental upserts and tombstone handling keep the index in sync with source-of-truth changes, while alerting catches drift or schema breaks. In Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), a robust Indexing Pipeline ensures the retriever surfaces fresh, relevant context that grounds an LLM’s answers, cutting hallucinations and token costs.