# AskDona Cloud-Hosted Edition: Product Definition, Functional Scope & Operational Requirements (Version 1.0)

> AskDona Cloud-Hosted Edition is a dedicated deployment of the AskDona AI-powered knowledge search, conversational question-answering, and research platform, operated in a designated cloud infrastructure environment rather than consumed solely as a shared, vendor-operated SaaS endpoint. It delivers functionally equivalent core product capabilities while the hosting environment, data handling, access policies, model connectivity, and operational arrangements are configured for the organization.

- Status: Current. Last verified 2026-10-15.
- In effect since: 2026-10-01
- Applies to: AskDona Cloud-Hosted Edition. Generalized, vendor-neutral capability definition (October 2026); features that depend on deployment design, licensing, selected models, enabled integrations, source-file quality or customer policy must be confirmed in the applicable solution design and acceptance criteria.
- Canonical: https://askdona.com/ai/cloud-hosted-edition-definition.md

ASKDONA  |  PRODUCT CAPABILITY DEFINITION

**AskDona Cloud-Hosted Edition**

**Product Definition, Functional Scope & Operational Requirements**

Version 1.0  |  October 2026

**Purpose.** This document defines the characteristics and baseline capabilities that distinguish a cloud-hosted deployment of AskDona. It is vendor-neutral with respect to the underlying cloud infrastructure and does not describe any individual customer or implementation.

## 1. Definition and qualification criteria

AskDona Cloud-Hosted Edition is a dedicated deployment of the AskDona AI-powered knowledge search, conversational question-answering, and research platform, operated in a designated cloud infrastructure environment rather than consumed solely as a shared, vendor-operated SaaS endpoint. The deployment delivers functionally equivalent core product capabilities while allowing the hosting environment, data handling, access policies, model connectivity, and operational arrangements to be configured for the organization.

A deployment qualifies as AskDona Cloud-Hosted Edition when all of the following principles are met:

- **Cloud-resident application and data services:** the AskDona application stack and its knowledge-processing/search components operate in an explicitly designated cloud environment.
- **Product-level functional parity:** the core knowledge ingestion, hybrid retrieval, grounded AI answering, end-user search, Deep Research, and administrative capabilities defined below are available.
- **Organization-controlled knowledge lifecycle:** authorized administrators can ingest, categorize, update, and remove organizational content without routine software development.
- **Configurable governance and integrations:** authentication, administrator permissions, permitted access paths, language-model backends, and service integration are configurable.
- **Operational readiness:** the solution is deployable, maintainable, monitored, supported, and developed through controlled security-oriented release processes.

## 2. Deployment and architecture

### 2.1 Hosting model

The platform runs in a designated cloud-hosted environment. Application processing, knowledge repositories, search indexes, and administration are provisioned for that deployment; access to external services, if enabled, is governed by deployment policy. The cloud infrastructure provider is not part of the product definition.

### 2.2 Logical components

The logical architecture comprises (i) document ingestion and processing, (ii) knowledge storage and metadata management, (iii) a vector index and a keyword index, with optional structured-data retrieval, (iv) retrieval orchestration and answer generation, (v) end-user chat/search/research experiences, and (vi) administration, analytics, and operational controls.

### 2.3 Model flexibility

Answer generation can be configured to use a general-purpose language-model API, a model API accessible within the designated environment, or a self-hosted language model, subject to the available integrations and deployment configuration.

### 2.4 Integration boundary

The user-facing experience can be embedded within an organization-designated website or exposed through an approved interface. Allowed origins/domains and corresponding access rules can be configured.

## 3. Knowledge base creation and document intelligence

- Ingest documents from cloud-resident data storage and allow authorized administrators to add content outside that storage through the management interface.
- Support document formats including PDF, HTML, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and CSV; publish the supported-format list and ingestion procedures for the actual release.
- Extract text and interpret document-associated visual content, including figures, charts and tables, to support questions about graphical trends and specific table values.
- Clean nonessential markup, structure source information, and extract relevant keywords as part of the indexing pipeline.
- Apply context-sensitive semantic chunking while preserving the substance and completeness of the source information.
- Interpret and extract mathematical and chemical expressions, including LaTeX-formatted content, so that expressions can contribute to retrieval and answering.
- Maintain at least a vector-search repository and a keyword-search repository as complementary knowledge retrieval mechanisms.
- Associate each file with a source URL and multiple user-defined metadata fields; support administrator-triggered indexing and re-indexing.

## 4. Retrieval-augmented conversational AI

- Interpret a user question and dynamically decompose complex requests into relevant subqueries.
- Select and combine semantic/vector search, keyword search and, where appropriate, structured-data search according to the subquery.
- Evaluate retrieved evidence against the original question and perform additional retrieval rounds when more information is needed.
- Dynamically rank retrieved material using relevance and configurable factors such as recency, source reliability, and organizational importance.
- Apply one or more metadata/category filters to restrict the information considered for retrieval.
- Generate responses grounded in retrieved knowledge, with source filenames and in-text reference markers.
- Use multi-turn dialogue to clarify ambiguous requests, request missing details, and refine the final answer.
- Allow administrators to configure conversational guidance, answer style, clarification behavior, and output format.

## 5. Unified end-user experience

The end-user interface brings together conversational AI chat, advanced knowledge search and Deep Research within one experience. It uses the same governed knowledge base managed by the platform.

- Conversational questions and source-grounded answers, including in-text citations and identification of originating documents.
- Advanced discovery using similarity and fuzzy matching, classification-oriented discovery and document ranking; support ranking or listing by reference frequency.
- Selectable knowledge categories derived from metadata, including multiple simultaneous selections.
- A route to designated pages or human assistance when an automated answer is insufficient.
- Lightweight user feedback through positive/negative controls and optional free-text comments.
- Ability to capture usage counts and impose usage limits without necessarily collecting personal identifiers, for example through browser-local state where appropriate.
- AI assistance capable of providing context-appropriate guidance and executing supported in-interface tasks.

## 6. Deep Research and batch intelligence

### 6.1 Agentic Deep Research

AskDona Cloud-Hosted Edition supports research across the indexed knowledge base using a coordinated workflow with distinct planning, research and writing roles. The workflow analyzes the research topic, asks for clarifications where necessary, produces a research plan, gathers and synthesizes supporting materials, and assembles a structured report. Reports link their claims to the underlying sources to facilitate verification.

The source specification describes an extended-report capability of approximately 4,000–6,000 Japanese characters, with potentially dozens to more than 100 source references depending on the request and available content. These figures describe a source-system capability target, not a universal output guarantee for all languages, subjects or datasets.

### 6.2 Additional productivity functions

- Export generated research reports in PDF or Word format.
- Run research functionality from the administration environment as well as the end-user experience, where enabled.
- Answer a supplied list of questions in batch rather than requiring one interactive conversation per question.
- Permit file attachments to inform knowledge-grounded administrator chat, and preview the relevant portion of a source document when its citation is selected.
- Provide AI-assisted knowledge organization and transformation in the administration workspace.

## 7. Administration and governance

### 7.1 Identity, access and auditability

- Restrict administration to authenticated, authorized users; add administrators and assign permissions.
- Support integration with an organization-designated identity provider where required.
- Support configurable IP-based access restrictions and review of administrator activity, data-management changes and authentication history.

### 7.2 No-code knowledge operations

- Provide an intuitive low-code/no-code interface for creating and maintaining knowledge bases and prompt configurations.
- Separate storage or logical data domains by purpose where needed.
- Edit document metadata and apply multiple metadata values to multiple files in bulk.
- Perform bulk additions, updates and deletions of selected knowledge assets.
- Preview prompt behavior through a test-chat facility before deploying prompt changes.

### 7.3 Service analytics

- Display usage and feedback metrics such as user counts, question counts, and positive/negative answer ratings.
- Analyze chat histories to surface questions for which useful answers were not provided.
- Identify frequently asked topics, referenced and under-referenced documents, and missing coverage (“knowledge gaps”).

## 8. Secure engineering and operations

Cloud hosting alone is not a security certification. The edition is expected to support organization-appropriate information handling, change control and secure software delivery. The source specification expressly calls for:

- Automated CI/CD covering source changes, build, tests and deployment.
- Static application security testing (SAST) for source-code defects.
- Software composition analysis (SCA), third-party dependency vulnerability checks and software bill of materials (SBOM) management.
- Vulnerability scans of build artifacts, including container images.
- Secret scanning to prevent accidental inclusion of credentials in repositories.
- Severity-based vulnerability management, including deployment blocking for unresolved Critical findings.
- Operational support, general usage and administration guidance, and a documented support channel and coverage schedule.
- Defined incident handling and appropriate confidentiality and authorized-information-access practices.

## 9. Service delivery characteristics

- The deployment should be ready for production operation following installation, configuration, content processing and acceptance testing.
- The product may support multiple administrator accounts and multilingual end-user chat experiences; exact seat counts, supported languages, usage limits and service levels are deployment-specific.
- Commercial terms may distinguish fixed software/service charges from usage-based or separately billed cloud infrastructure costs.
- Optional high-touch content preparation, implementation assistance and enhanced support may be arranged outside the standard support package.
- The operator should be able to provide implementation confirmation, recurring operational reporting, answer-quality analysis and incident reports where contractually required.

## 10. Scope boundaries and interpretation

This document is a generalized capability definition, adapted from the provided functional and operational specification. It is not a claim that every item has been independently tested or enabled in every current AskDona installation. Features dependent on deployment design, licensing, selected models, enabled integrations, source-file quality or customer policy must be confirmed in the applicable solution design and acceptance criteria.

The definition intentionally excludes organization names, named hosting providers, procurement dates, customer-specific pricing and seat counts, named identity-provider products, customer deliverable ownership clauses and other contract-specific conditions. Compliance with any particular cloud assurance program is also a deployment-level determination rather than an inherent property of the product name.

## 11. Qualification checklist

<div class="table-scroll">

| Pillar | Minimum qualification evidence |
| :--- | :--- |
| Deployment | Dedicated cloud-hosted stack; documented boundaries and integrations |
| Knowledge processing | Multiformat ingestion; contextual extraction; metadata; searchable vector and keyword indexes |
| Answering | Hybrid and iterative retrieval; grounded conversational responses; citations |
| User workflows | Unified chat, advanced search, research, filtering and feedback |
| Administration | Role-based access; no-code content/prompt management; activity and usage visibility |
| Research automation | Multi-stage Deep Research; cited reports; batch question answering |
| Operations and security | Deployment procedures; support model; secure CI/CD and vulnerability controls |

</div>

**Document basis:** generalized from the provided Japanese specification, principally its Sections 3.1–3.3. Customer- and contract-specific provisions are excluded by design.

AskDona Cloud-Hosted Edition  •  Product definition  •  October 2026