Asking Questions — Answers with Evidence

Learn how to ask the ontology questions in plain language in the Ask & Act tab, and how to check the evidence behind each answer. You practice with the sample ontology Supply Chain Operations (Sample).

The Ask & Act tab#

Open the Ask & Act card on the home screen. Example questions are in the middle, and the graph of the published ontology is on the right.

This tab takes both questions and commands. Ask a question and it answers; give a command and it plans an action (commands are covered in Chapter 16). When you only ask questions, nothing changes.

Asking#

Click an example question, or type your own.

Which inbound shipments are more than 3 days late, and which supplier and purchase order are they for?

The agent first reads the schema of the published ontology, then queries the graph with Cypher to build its answer (about 30 seconds in our tests). In the graph on the right, the nodes used in the answer are highlighted.

How to read an answer#

A good answer has three parts.

1. Conclusion — “The shipments more than 3 days late are SHP-03 (9 days) and SHP-02 (7 days). Both are for Shenzhen Goldline PCB's purchase orders.”
2. Evidence — “Of the 8 Shipment nodes in the graph, 2 have delay_days > 3. I found the supplier and purchase orders by following the SHIPPED_BY → Supplier and SHIPS → PurchaseOrder relationships.”
3. Limits — “SHP-06 is exactly 3 days late, so I left it out under ‘more than 3 days’. If you count 3 days or more, there are 3.” “I only answered your question; nothing was changed.”

Because the evidence is there, you can double-check the answer. Run the same question as Cypher in the portal and you should get the same result (Chapter 8).

MATCH (sh:Shipment)-[:SHIPS]->(po:PurchaseOrder)-[:ORDERED_FROM]->(s:Supplier)
WHERE sh.delay_days > 3
RETURN sh.shipment_no, sh.delay_days, po.po_id, s.name

Follow-up questions#

If you keep asking in the same conversation, the agent uses the context of what came before.

What other open purchase orders does that supplier have?

Which customer's order did the PCB soldering defect claim come from?

The second question goes through completely different relationships (Claim → SalesOrder → Customer) from the first, yet nothing new has to be designed. The agent just follows relationships that already exist — the power of the “next question” described in Chapter 3.

Managing conversations#

• Expand Workspace in the rail to see past conversations and start a new one.
• Conversations also stay in the Recent list on the home screen. Click one to go straight to it.
• Drag a document in (📎) to attach it to the conversation and ask about it too.