Structure written once
Relationships live in the layer instead of in the memory of the team that wrote the joins.
Knowledge Systems
Relationships, evidence and answers in one layer.
A knowledge system is the relationship structure an organisation already has, written down where a query can reach it.
A question about reach that is a traversal, not a pile of joins.
Entities and relationships made queryable rather than reconstructed at read time.
Entities, their attributes and the relationships between them are usually implicit in foreign keys and conventions. PLOMID is designed to hold relationships as data, so traversal is a query rather than a set of joins an application has to remember.
A question about reach that is a traversal, not a pile of joins.
Environment
The entities
People, accounts, parts and systems with identifiers that already exist as records.
SQL
Two estates, drawn.
The same shapes, held two ways. The difference is not the storage, it is where the agreement between them lives.
Separate systems Copies kept in step
One layer One plan · one contract
What this workload moves.
Every shape below is a surface of the layer, not a format to be converted into one. They are read and written together.
- Graph Relationships and traversal
- SQL Records, keys and joins
- JSON / documents Documents and nested objects
- Vector Similarity and semantic retrieval
How the workload reaches the data.
The models this workload names, the path a request takes through them, and the surfaces that speak to the layer.
Knowledge Systems · architecture
Workload
The shape of the work itself.
- Model
- Connect
- Traverse
- Explain
Data models
The models this workload names.
- Graph
- SQL
- JSON / documents
- Vector
The layer
One path from a request to the data it names.
- Planning Predicates narrow the work before it runs
- Execution Rows, fields and windows answered together
- Transactions Readers and writers do not block each other
Surfaces
How the workload reaches the layer.
- SQL surface The query language the layer is documented in
- Applications Services and jobs reading and writing as they run
- Analytics & AI clients The same layer, the same access path
The work, stage by stage.
Choose a stage to read what happens there, or a shape to see every stage that handles it. Nothing on the map is a private interface.
PLOMID · Knowledge Systems model · connect · traverse · explain Select a stage
Stage
Model
Entities and their identifiers
SQL
01
Model
Entities and their identifiers
- SQL
02
Connect
Relationships written as data
- Graph
03
Traverse
Reachability and impact answered directly
- Graph
04
Explain
The path is returned with the answer
- JSON / documents
- Vector
What changes when the data is in one place.
Stated as properties of the system rather than as results we cannot measure for you.
Multi-hop questions
Dependency and impact analysis becomes a traversal rather than recursive application code.
Explainable answers
The path taken is part of the result, which matters when a decision has to be justified.
Bounded complexity
One structure serves discovery, search and governance questions.
What this is built on.
Knowledge questions are questions about structure. These are the parts that hold it.
- Relationships held as data → Edges expressed directly remove the reconstruction that happens at query time when relationships live in a join.
- Retrieval as an access path → Similarity search arrives as another way into the same data rather than a second copy to keep in step.
- One data layer → Rows, documents and time-ordered events live in one system, so a question is asked once instead of once per store.
- One plan per request → A request is planned once against the layer rather than per system, which is where cross-system glue usually accumulates.
Workloads that sit beside this one.
Where this shows up.
Derived from the industry pages that reference this solution, so the two directions of the relationship always agree.
- Risk & Fraud → Signals, relationships, cases and decisions across an institution’s data.
- Supply Chain → Suppliers, orders, inventory, movements and the documents between them.
- Healthcare → Clinical records, encounters, observations, orders and results.
- Life Sciences → Experiment records, instrument data, sample lineage and publications.
- Pharmaceuticals → Trial data, batch records, regulatory submissions and pharmacovigilance.
- Engineering → Drawings, models, bills of materials, test results and project records.
- Cybersecurity → Telemetry, identity, asset relationships and the cases that follow.