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ARTICLE: How to Index Public Datasets and Government Reports for RAG
URL: https://omniscient.news/blog/index-public-datasets-government-reports-rag
Published: 2026-04-02
Updated: 2026-04-01
Category: AI Agents & LLMs
Tags: RAG, public data, government reports, data journalism, knowledge base
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Public datasets and government reports are among the most authoritative primary sources available. Here is how to make them searchable via RAG for journalist research.

Government reports, academic datasets, and official statistics are the gold-standard sources for verified journalism — but they are often difficult to search quickly. Building a RAG-enabled index of key primary sources for your beat transforms hours of document search into seconds of natural-language querying.

The Primary Source Indexing Process

1. Identify key sources for your beat: List the 20–30 most important recurring primary sources (government statistics agencies, regulatory filings databases, academic journals, international organisation reports). 2. Set up automated downloads: Many official data sources have APIs or RSS feeds. Configure automatic download of new reports when they're published. 3. Convert to text: PDF documents require OCR extraction (Adobe Acrobat, PyMuPDF, or Tika). CSV data requires natural-language conversion of column definitions. 4. Chunk and embed: Split into 500-token chunks, embed with text-embedding-3-small, store in a vector database. 5. Build a query interface: A simple chat interface that lets reporters ask "What did the ONS say about employment in Q4 2026?" and returns the answer with a citation to the specific document and page number.

Frequently Asked Questions

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