An onboarding recipe

To make this concrete, here is the path I would hand a domain team lead who wants to onboard their content.

Define the scope: which documents, from which source systems, owned by whom, in or out. Write it down; it becomes the product's scope statement. Connect the source through the platform's ingestion service, which handles deduplication, parsing into the canonical model, structure-first chunking, and registration in the catalog. That is minimum viable, and it is already retrievable through the standard API. Configure enrichment: choose the extractors and summaries appropriate to the content class, add the domain's vocabulary and any domain-specific metadata fields, and require the five dimensions of context. That is enriched. Build an evaluation set of a hundred or so real questions with graded evidence, set freshness commitments per content class, define the review workflow and who signs off on supersession, and enable audit logging. Measure and publish quality. That is governed. Then let other domains find it in the catalog and consume it, and expose it as a tool for agents. That is reusable.

Each step takes weeks, not quarters. Each step delivers value before the next. No other team has to do anything for this team to proceed. That incremental adoptability is the property that decides whether the federated model succeeds; a platform that requires every domain to migrate at once will not get any of them.