Separation of Concerns (SoC)

Overview

Separation of Concerns is a design principle for separating a system into distinct sections, each addressing a separate concern. In OCapistaine, we apply this to both code architecture and workflow design.

Application in OCapistaine

Code Architecture

Layer	Concern	Implementation
Data Collection	Web scraping & OCR	src/firecrawl_utils.py
Configuration	Data sources & settings	src/config.py
Orchestration	CLI & workflow control	src/crawl_municipal_docs.py
Storage	Document persistence	ext_data/ directory

Workflow Separation

Workflow	Responsibility
Firecrawl	Document acquisition
OCR Processing	Text extraction from PDFs
RAG System	Semantic search & Q&A
N8N Orchestration	Multi-channel integration

Benefits

1. Maintainability - Changes to one concern don't affect others
2. Testability - Each component can be tested independently
3. Scalability - Components can be scaled based on load
4. Collaboration - Team members can work on different concerns simultaneously

Related Principles

• TRIZ Methodology - Principle #1 Segmentation
• Theory of Constraints - Focus on bottlenecks