Been looking for a self-hostable way to maintain a personal knowledge base from research docs without the complexity of setting up a vector database, writing chunking logic, and babysitting embeddings. Ran into OpenKB this week and it's closer to what I wanted than anything else I've tried.
Core idea: instead of classic RAG (chunk → embed → retrieve → answer), it compiles your documents once into a structured Markdown wiki, then the LLM queries the compiled wiki. Knowledge persists and accumulates. No re-derivation from scratch on every query.
Long PDFs are handled by building a tree index of the document rather than reading it in full, so you don't need massive context windows or chunking hacks for dense technical manuals.
Just think it's a genuinely useful approach compared to most RAG tooling I've seen. Anyone running something similar for personal document research?