Media and Research RAG
Master the patterns for building RAG systems for podcasts, video archives, and scientific publications.
Media and Research RAG
Media and Research RAG is primarily about summarization and discovery across massive archives of non-textual data.
Pattern: The "Multimodal Explorer"
Instead of a simple chatbot, these systems often use a dashboard approach.
- User searches for "Climate Change Impact on Reefs."
- RAG returns:
- Scientific Papers (PDFs).
- Documentary Clips (Video Segments).
- Expert Interviews (Audio Transcripts).
- Satellite Images (Visual Data).
Key Implementation Details
- Temporal Scrubbing: Allow users to click a text snippet and jump to the exact second in a 2-hour long video.
- Abstractive Ingestion: For scientific papers, index the "Abstract" and "Conclusion" with higher weight than the "Methods" section.
- Cross-Reference Extraction: Automatically identify when one paper cites another and link them in your metadata.
Case Study: Podcast Search
A user remembers hearing a guest talk about "intermittent fasting" on a podcast but doesn't remember which one.
- The RAG system transcribes (Whisper), chunks by topic (Semantic), and allows the user to find the exact 3-minute segment across 500 episodes.
Handling Visual Evidence
If a research paper contains a complex "Chart," the RAG system should use Vision (Claude) to describe that chart so it becomes text-searchable.
Exercises
- Why is "Chapter Detection" important for video RAG?
- How would you handle "Multilingual" media (e.g., a Spanish podcast being searched in English)?
- Design a metadata schema for a "Scientific Paper" RAG.