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Usage

Scope and Context - ONA.UNO Docs

How ONA.UNO decides what your actions apply to (all, filtered, selection, KB)

When you use ONA.UNO, different parts of the app respond to what you’re doing: chat answers questions based on a certain set of items, the summary pane shows detail for what you’ve selected, and search narrows what’s visible. This page explains how ONA.UNO decides what applies where — so the behavior always makes sense.

Two kinds of context

ONA.UNO tracks two things separately:

Conversation scope is what Chat uses to find answers. This could be all your items, a filtered search result, a specific selection, or the ONA.UNO Knowledgebase.

Inspection selection is what the Summary and Original panes show. When you click an item in the timeline, the sidebar shows its summary and original content.

These two often align — but they don’t have to. You can click around in the timeline to inspect different items while chat keeps working with a broader (or different) set of content.

How ONA.UNO decides what to show you

When multiple things could define your scope, ONA.UNO follows a clear priority:

  1. Knowledgebase mode — if you’ve opened Chat with Knowledgebase, everything uses ONA.UNO’s own help docs until you exit.
  2. Active chat retrieval — while you’re in a chat conversation and clicking citations to explore source items, chat keeps its scope locked so your browsing doesn’t change the conversation context.
  3. Committed search — if you’ve searched and committed the results, chat and summaries work within those filtered items. This stays active even if you click on individual items for inspection.
  4. Current selection — if you’ve selected one or more items in the timeline, chat focuses on those.
  5. All items — when nothing else applies, chat has access to everything in your current Set.

The key insight: a committed search “wins” over a selection. So you can search for a topic, then click individual items to read them, and chat still covers the full search results — not just the one item you clicked on.

Common situations

Nothing selected, no search active. Chat scope covers all items in your Set. The summary and original panes are empty until you click something.

You selected a single item. Chat focuses on that item — great for asking detailed questions about one document. The summary and original panes show that item’s content.

You selected multiple items. Chat covers all selected items. The summary and original panes are disabled (they work with one item at a time), but chat handles multiple items naturally.

You committed a search. Chat and day/daypart summaries use only the filtered results — regardless of which search scope you used (Titles, Summary, Content, or Semantic). You can still click individual items to inspect them in the sidebar, but chat stays on the filtered set until you clear the search. If your filtered results include starred items, day and daypart summaries show those first in a dedicated section, followed by the regular overview.

You’re browsing citations during a chat. When you click a citation in a chat response, the timeline jumps to that item and the sidebar shows its summary and original content. But the chat scope stays locked — you’re exploring the evidence without losing the conversation context. This keeps things stable: you can click through several citations, read the originals, and come back to chat without it changing underneath you.

Knowledgebase chat. When you open Chat with Knowledgebase, you’re asking about ONA.UNO itself — not your content. Exiting Knowledgebase mode brings you back to your normal scope.

Reading the scope at a glance

The chat header always tells you what scope is active — look for “Chatting with: All items” or “Chatting with: Filtered” or the specific item name. The toolbar button also switches between All and Filtered so you can tell at a glance whether a search is narrowing your context.