Release Notes: Semantic Search Agent#

This page tracks releases of the Semantic Search Agent microservice. The most recent release is listed first.

Version 2026.1.0#

First release of the Semantic Search Agent as a production-ready, multi-strategy AI comparison microservice.

Release Date: June 17, 2026

New:

  • REST Comparison API with three endpoints:

    • POST /api/v1/compare/order — Two-pass order validation (exact then semantic) returning missing, extra, quantity-mismatch, and matched item sets.

    • POST /api/v1/compare/inventory — Per-item inventory lookup with exact and semantic fallback against a configurable JSON inventory.

    • POST /api/v1/compare/semantic — Generic pairwise semantic comparison returning match boolean, confidence score, and VLM reasoning.

  • Three Matching Strategies (exact, semantic, hybrid) selectable via DEFAULT_MATCHING_STRATEGY environment variable.

  • Two-Pass Comparison Engine — Exact matching resolved first without VLM calls; semantic matching applied only to unmatched items to minimize inference cost.

  • Pluggable VLM Backends built-in:

    • OVMS — OpenVINO Model Server via OpenAI-compatible /v3/chat/completions endpoint. Proxy bypass for internal OVMS hosts.

    • OpenVINO Local — In-process inference using openvino-genai library with configurable device (GPU, CPU, AUTO).

    • OpenAI — Cloud API fallback for development and testing.

  • VLMBackendFactory — Singleton factory with instance caching to avoid re-initializing backends on each request.

  • Response Caching — In-memory (MemoryCache) and Redis-backed (RedisCache) caches for semantic match results, keyed by MD5 hash of the input pair and context. Configurable TTL.

  • Prometheus Metrics — api_requests_total, matches_total, request_duration_seconds, vlm_inference_duration_seconds, cache_hits_total, cache_misses_total, and vlm_backend_available gauges.

  • Pydantic Settings — Full environment variable and .env file configuration with type validation and clear startup errors on missing required variables.

  • Health Check Endpoint (GET /api/v1/health) reporting service version, VLM backend type, VLM availability status, and uptime.

  • New User Guide documentation set including Overview, Get Started, How It Works, Configuration, API Reference, Troubleshooting, and Release Notes.

  • Containerization running as non-root user (UID 1000) with built-in Docker health check.

  • Redis optional sidecar in Docker Compose for persistent semantic match caching.

  • Modular matcher and VLM backend design allowing extension with new strategies or inference backends.

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