Kotaemon is an orchestration framework designed for building modular, agentic workflows that integrate document processing, retrieval-augmented generation, and multi-step reasoning. It provides a comprehensive platform for developing document-based question answering systems, allowing users to chain language models, prompt templates, and external tools into complex, automated pipelines.
The system distinguishes itself through a highly modular architecture that emphasizes component-based composition and schema-driven data exchange. It supports autonomous agents capable of decomposing complex queries through iterative processing and tool-calling, while its hybrid retrieval orchestration combines vector similarity and full-text search with re-ranking to improve the accuracy of retrieved context. The framework also features event-driven streaming, which delivers incremental results from long-running pipelines to the user interface in real-time.
Beyond its core reasoning capabilities, the platform includes a suite of functional modules for the entire lifecycle of document-based applications. This includes multi-modal parsing for extracting text, tables, and visual elements from diverse file formats, as well as administrative tools for managing document collections, vector stores, and multi-user access. The system is designed to be interface-agnostic, allowing developers to wrap third-party libraries and external services into standardized, reusable processing units.
The project provides a web-based user interface for interactive querying and configuration, and it supports deployment of private, isolated instances through predefined templates.
