# Concepts

> The four primitives in Owlish — agents, knowledge, sessions, channels — and how they relate. Worth skimming before you build.

import Screenshot from "../../../components/docs/Screenshot.astro";

Owlish's mental model is small on purpose. There are four primitives and they always relate the same way. If you understand this page, the rest of the docs is recipes.

## Agents

An **agent** is a configured behavior — a persona, an instruction set, a chosen model, and a set of attached knowledge and actions. Agents are not chat sessions; they're the *configuration* that drives chat sessions. You can have many agents in a workspace (e.g., a public support bot, an internal IT helpdesk, a sales qualifier).

## Knowledge

**Knowledge** is everything the agent can ground answers in. It's organized in folders, and each folder contains sources: websites, files (PDF, DOCX, CSV), or Direct Response answers (a question plus a canonical reply). Sources are ingested asynchronously, chunked, embedded, and made available to any agent that has access to that folder. Citations on agent answers always point back to a specific source.

<Screenshot src="/screenshots/sources-00-all-sources-table.webp" alt="Knowledge base sources table with folders, status, type, last-updated date, and attached agents." label="Console · Knowledge folders" description="The knowledge base view showing folders grouped by type with status counts." />

## Sessions

A **session** is one continuous conversation between a visitor and an agent — could be 2 messages, could be 50. Sessions are durable: every message is stored as a `session_event`, and reopening the same session continues where it left off. The Helpdesk inbox is the master list of all sessions across all channels.

## Channels

A **channel** is *where* a session happens. The same agent can answer on the web widget, in Slack, in Teams, in Discord, in email — each one is a channel binding on the agent. Channels look different (Slack threads vs. a chat bubble) but they all produce sessions in the same shape, which is why everything ends up in one inbox.

## How they fit together

```
Workspace
└── Agent (config)
    ├── Knowledge folders ── sources ── chunks
    ├── Channel bindings ── widget, slack, teams, …
    └── Sessions ── events (user/agent messages, citations, handoffs)
```

The relationships are deliberately one-way: knowledge feeds the agent, the agent runs on channels, channels produce sessions, and sessions live in the Helpdesk. There are no implicit links between, say, a Slack channel and a knowledge folder — everything goes through the agent.

## Next steps

- **[Build your first agent](/docs/quick-start/build-your-first-agent)** — apply this mental model in a hands-on walkthrough.
- **[Knowledge base overview](/docs/knowledge-base/overview)** — go deeper on sources, folders, and re-training.

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Source: https://owlish.bot/docs/quick-start/concepts