Didact: A Cross-Domain Capability Discovery System for Defence
For defence policymakers, it addresses fragmented, siloed information discovery, but is a prototype with limited evaluation and incremental contribution.
Didact integrates defence reports and research publications into a knowledge graph with a composite RAG pipeline and interactive Evidence Rail, enabling natural language queries for policy workflows. Evaluation shows utility in output quality and runtime.
Policymakers in defence and defence-aligned sectors must monitor rapidly evolving research alongside sector priorities relevant to operational and strategic needs. In practice, these sources are fragmented across heterogeneous formats, disjoint repositories, and siloed update streams, making capability discovery slow and difficult to audit. We present Didact, a prototype that integrates publicly available defence reports and policy documents from Australia with a purpose-built knowledge graph derived from Australian research publications. Didact provides natural language conversations for policy-oriented workflows, and leverages a composite retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline. A key feature of Didact is an interactive Evidence Rail that visualises retrieved evidence and source relationships. Our evaluation of the output quality and runtime of Didact highlights its utility. While Didact has been co-developed as an academia-industry project for the Australian context, it is adaptable to other domains where knowledge is similarly fragmented. A demonstration video is available here: