Index Freshness

Freshness is the gap between what is true and what the system will say. A policy updated on Monday and indexed on Friday means four days of confidently citing a superseded version, and unlike most failures this one produces no error — the answer is well-formed, well-cited and wrong. Freshness requirements vary sharply by content: a phone directory tolerates a week, a drug interaction table does not. The useful discipline is stating the tolerance per corpus and measuring against it, rather than treating indexing as a background task with unspecified timing.

Indexing in Centralpoint is triggered by record lifecycle rather than by a blanket schedule, so a released change enters the retrieval surface as part of publication rather than waiting for the next sweep. The vector index can be inspected directly, which makes freshness a measurable property rather than an assumption about the last job run.