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COMPEL Glossary / knowledge-plane

Knowledge plane

The layer of an AI system that stores and serves non-parametric knowledge to the model — through retrieval over vector stores, traditional indexes, and tool-based data access.

What this means in practice

Distinguishing the knowledge plane from the model plane is a governance prerequisite because the two have different change cadences, data-residency requirements, and deletion obligations.

Synonyms

retrieval plane , AI knowledge layer

See also

  • Orchestration plane — The layer of an AI system that coordinates prompts, retrievals, tool calls, safety filters, and routing between the user and one or more models.
  • Vector store — A governed index of embeddings — numeric vector representations of text, image, or multimodal content — that supports similarity search used by retrieval-augmented generation.
  • Embedding model — A model that maps text, images, or multimodal content to dense vector representations used for retrieval, clustering, and similarity search.