Concepts

Core concepts for working with Laws.Africa Knowledge Bases.

Knowledge Bases retrieve legal context from maintained Laws.Africa collections. They are designed for applications that need search and grounding, not full local copies of legal content.

Knowledge Base codes

Each Knowledge Base has a unique code. You use the code in API URLs:

POST /ai/v1/knowledge-bases/{code}/retrieve

List the Knowledge Bases available to your account with:

GET /ai/v1/knowledge-bases

Places and content types

Knowledge Bases are scoped by place and content type. A place can be a country, province, municipality or other locality.

The current content types are:

• legislation;

• judgments.

For legislation, place identifiers follow the FRBR place codes used by Akoma Ntoso and the Content API. For example, za is South Africa and za-cpt is the City of Cape Town.

Retrieve requests

A retrieve request includes:

• text: the query text to match;

• top_k: the maximum number of results to return;

• filters: optional metadata filters.

{
  "text": "delict slip and trip",
  "top_k": 5,
  "filters": {}
}

top_k defaults to 10. The maximum is 100.

Retrieve results

Each result includes:

• content.text: the matched legal text or summary;

• metadata: source information such as title, FRBR URI, dates and public URLs;

• score: an opaque relevance score.

Results are returned in descending relevance order. Higher scores indicate stronger matches. Treat scores as opaque non-negative ranking values; compare them only within the same response.

Use public URLs from result metadata when showing results to users or grounding AI responses. They let users inspect the source material.

Query text

You can send a user's question directly as text, but AI workflows often get better matches when a model first rewrites the question as a focused legal search query.

For example, a user may ask:

Can my landlord lock me out without a court order?

Your application might query:

eviction lockout without court order residential tenant

Plans and limits

Knowledge Bases are available on the platform's Sandbox, Build and Scale plans. Plans differ by country coverage, content availability and rate limits. See Pricing and plans for developer-facing details.