The Evidence Tree
Last updated
Last updated
The evidence for a result can be displayed visually in what is called The Evidence Tree, which shows the full chain of reasoning, and The Salience Chart, which shows a more granular view of each rule detailing how the certainty was established.
This provides an easy way to see how a decision was made for debugging, troubleshooting and audit purposes.
These visualisations are predominantly designed for Rainbird Authors to use to inspect the chain of reasoning during development or to review decisions in production. Presenting the evidence of a decision to an end-user tends to require a custom solution per use case. We can provide assistance on how to construct custom evidence displays for end-users using our APIs.
For Authors working in the Studio, the Evidence Tree for any result you receive can be accessed by clicking the information icon that appears next to the result.
This will open the evidence tree in a new tab and display a fact card for the result you received. This shows details on how the fact was generated in order to answer the query.
Where you receive multiple results to a query, there will be a unique evidence tree for each result.
A fact card shows:
The source of the fact (a rule, answer, knowledge map, inject or datasource)
The certainty of the fact (0-100%)
The subject, relationship and object names (e.g. (Person) > speaks > (Language))
The subject, relationship and object values (e.g. Mike > speaks > English)
The conditions of the rule (only when the source of the fact was a rule)
Each condition can be expanded to view its own fact card. Where this fact was generate by another rule, those conditions can also be expanded further, and so on. When a fact was generated by another means other than a rule this is the end of the chain and you can expand no further.
The source of a fact could be one of the following:
Rule: a fact was generated because it met the conditions configured in the knowledge map (displayed in blue)
Inject: the fact was injected into the session via API (displayed in grey)
Answer: the fact was generated from an end-users answer (displayed in red)
Datasource: the fact was generated from a datasource response (displayed in green)
Knowledge map: the fact was hard-coded in the knowledge map (displayed in yellow)
When a fact was generated by a rule, the Salience View can be accessed to understand how the certainty and weighting on each condition affected the overall certainty of the fact generated. This can be opened by clicking blue square above the conditions list.
Further information on access and functionality be found in The Salience View section.
The Evidence Tree, as well as the Evidence Tree API, is an audit log that provides the rationale behind a Rainbird decision. Sometime, the Evidence Tree can contain sensitive data such as Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or confidential business logic.
By default, access to the evidence tree is secured with a 256-bit encryption key that must be provided with every request for authentication, providing control over who can access this data.
When Authors with permission to view the knowledge map open the Evidence Tree from the Studio, it will always load. However, if the Evidence Tree needs to be accessed by users without permission to view the knowledge map, or people without a Rainbird account, then link sharing needs to be enabled.
This may be required when:
Manually sharing the URL with others to view the Evidence Tree
Publishing and sharing a Rainbird Agent with colleagues or end-users that allow them to view the evidence
Storing the Evidence Tree URL alongside the results in your system
Access Control settings are available in the Rainbird Studio by clicking ‘Publish’ on the top left hand side.
Publicly shareable links are disabled by default and a message will be displayed that the evidence key will be required to view. When building custom integrations to the Evidence API, copy the Evidence Key to share with your development team.
To make the Evidence Tree available to anyone with the link, toggle sharing on.
Link sharing can be toggled on and off per Knowledge Map
If you believe your evidence key has been exposed or compromised, please contact us immediately.
Some solutions need to store a link to the Evidence Tree alongside query results within their own systems for audit purposes.
Where this is required, the URL can be programmatically built. This is covered in a Developer Guides article.
