Reviving our data foundations is the most disruptive step to data maturity

For decades, data engineering has developed mature architectural principles for integrating, governing, validating, cataloging, and serving organizational data. The rise of large language models does not eliminate these concerns; it exposes a broader version of them. Organizational knowledge is becoming executable infrastructure: systems increasingly retrieve it, assemble it, reason over it, and act on it. This paper argues that enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) systems suggest a transition toward an architectural discipline for representing, maintaining, governing, and operationally delivering organizational knowledge. We refer to this discipline as knowledge architecture. We offer a conceptual model and taxonomy showing how classical data-engineering guarantees must be redefined when the managed unit shifts from records to knowledge artifacts: extract, transform, and load (ETL) becomes knowledge ingestion, change-data capture (CDC) becomes knowledge change detection, lineage becomes provenance, catalogs become knowledge catalogs, materialized views become knowledge views, and medallion architectures become raw--curated--operational knowledge layers. Emerging formats such as large language model (LLM) Wiki and the Open Knowledge Format (OKF) are treated as early evidence of this transition, not as its endpoint. The central claim is that knowledge architecture becomes useful when organizational knowledge ceases to be a passive information resource and becomes an operational asset used by humans, agents, workflows, and models to execute work.

Enterprise data analytics agents face two structural failures: generic RAG retrieves the wrong asset (Hit@10=19.1%) and delivers no usage knowledge to prevent metric misinterpretation---stemming from four root causes (C1--C4) ranging from semantic gap and entity ambiguity to schema drift and asset-usage gap. We present a two-layer solution deployed in the commercial advertising data warehouse at Xiaohongshu (5,300+ Hive tables, 14 domains). A three-tier dual-purpose knowledge base (179 documents, eight-section annotation template) serves both retrieval and generation, with a closed-loop refresh pipeline maintaining day-level freshness (one yes/no approval, 30s hot-reload). The Graph-Guided Retriever (GGR) uses a 2,859-node knowledge graph as a candidate gate with intent routing to deliver 71.6x token reduction. The Scene-Aware Ranker (SAR) applies 19-class entity recognition and explicit scenario annotations; negative knowledge alone contributes 25 percentage points of Hit@10 gain. On two 100-question benchmarks, Hit@10 rises from 19.1% to 96.6% (+77.5pp) and knowledge coverage from 56% to 77%, at 4.84--5.33s end-to-end latency.

Enterprise data assistants using large language models (LLMs) promise democratized data access in organizations. Yet in our real-world deployment within the CFO unit's data lake at an industry partner, we observed that business users frequently pose imperfect prompts that include domain-specific vocabulary and lack schema references or structural information. This Design Science Research study examines automatic resolution using a semantic mediation layer. We design and evaluate two design variants: schema-based mediation via semantic similarity, and knowledge graph-based mediation leveraging an automatically constructed knowledge graph from the data lake. Our simulation-based evaluation using real-world data, supported by LLM-as-a-Judge assessments and human validation, shows that knowledge graph-based mediation outperforms the schema-based approach in Precision, Recall, F1, and preserving user intent. We propose a design principle for knowledge graph-based mediation, demonstrating that structured knowledge representation bridges user intent and database structure and guides the design of enterprise data assistants across skill levels.