A drawing at index F points to an assembly specification and that specification sets a torque of 12.5 N·m at edition D. The first article report that signs off the part was written under edition C and holds 11 N·m. Both documents sit in the right place and both are correct. The question "which torque applies to the M8 nuts of support SUP-208" only has an answer if you know that those three documents point to each other.
Put the question to an agent plugged into your documentation and look at what comes back. A similarity index brings together sentences that look alike and never sees that link. A general assistant fills the gap with what it knows about the subject at large and says it in the same tone as a verified value.
Soma builds the link. A graph of entities and relations drawn from your documents: drawing SUP-208 is defined by specification SM-35 and waiver D-114 applies to the batch shipped. And a plain passage index, which finds the sentence word for word. One question goes to both and the engine arbitrates on what it asks for, the graph to follow a chain and the index for the exact citation.
The same engine plugs into what you already run, SharePoint and file servers and PLM and ERP, and it answers in the Soma workspace or in the assistant your teams already use, over MCP.
On the SUP-208 question, the answer comes back with its three passages and the edition in force and the gap flagged when a document still rests on the one it replaced. Tables are read as tables and schematics as schematics and the cell is cited.
The rest is engineering. It runs on your servers with open models or in your cloud or in ours. The access rights of the file are the access rights of the answer and no external model learns from your documents. Your document management system keeps the files and Soma links what it holds.
The engine came out of a year of R&D at a hydrogen aircraft maker, where ninety people used it for six months, from engineering to compliance. The time spent producing regulatory documentation there halved, and the design review file went before EASA.
It runs today at customers in regulated industries, from finance to engineering.
Hugo Couvreur
Gabriel Landman
Virgile Augendre