CTU Daanbantayan Campus Library · Capstone Repository

About RE-CAPS

A next-generation digital undergraduate theses repository designed for Cebu Technological University — Daanbantayan Campus. Powered by Pinecone vector semantic search, a 4-tier cascading AI research engine, and instant multi-format academic citation generation.

Start Searching How RAG Works Meet the Team

Digital Indexing

Past physical binders digitized and cataloged

0-D

Dense Vectors

Multilingual E5 embedding space via Pinecone

Cascading AI Engine

Mistral → Groq → Gemini → OpenRouter

0 Styles

Citation Generator

APA 7th, IEEE, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, BibTeX

The Academic Challenge

Why Traditional Research Archives Fall Short

Before RE-CAPS, undergraduate researchers and faculty advisers at CTU Daanbantayan faced systemic hurdles when trying to discover, evaluate, and cite past capstone manuscripts.

Physical Binder Silos

Decades of capstones locked in shelf binders with no digital index, accessible only during library hours.

Keyword Search Blindness

Traditional exact keyword searches miss relevant studies that use conceptual synonyms, acronyms, or differing academic phrasing.

Unintentional Duplication

Students frequently proposed capstone ideas that had already been defended in prior semesters due to lack of cross-year visibility.

Citation Overhead

Manual bibliography formatting in APA, IEEE, or MLA caused citation inaccuracies and wasted critical writing time.

Architecture Breakdown

How the RE-CAPS RAG Pipeline Works

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds language models in verified university thesis data, eliminating AI hallucinations and providing source citations.

Stage 01

Vector Ingestion

Each thesis title, abstract, methodology, and key findings are transformed into 1024-dimensional dense vectors using the multilingual-e5-large model.

multilingual-e5-large

Stage 02

Pinecone Similarity

When a student searches, their natural language query is vectorized in real time and matched against the Pinecone index using cosine similarity (80%+ threshold).

Pinecone Vector DB

Stage 03

Context Grounding

The top relevant manuscripts, author credits, advisers, and key discoveries are injected into the AI context window as authoritative ground truth.

System Prompt Grounding

Stage 04

Cascading Synthesis

A 4-tier cascading engine (Mistral → Groq → Gemini → OpenRouter) streams word-by-word academic responses with real citations via Server-Sent Events.

SSE Streaming API

Interactive RAG Query Simulator

Click a sample research query below to preview simulated vector matching and RAG synthesis:

Simulated Query:

"IoT-based Smart Aquaculture & Water Quality Monitoring in Northern Cebu"

Pinecone Cosine Match:

97.8%

IoT-Driven Water Quality Monitoring and Automated Aeration for Coastal Aquaculture in Northern Cebu

BSIT A.Y. 2025 Adviser: Prof. M. Arriesgado

Utilizes an ESP32 sensor cluster measuring dissolved oxygen (DO), pH, and salinity with MQTT telemetry and cloud alarms. Evaluated at Daanbantayan coastal fish ponds, the system demonstrated a 34% reduction in unexpected aquatic mortality and enabled real-time mobile notifications for farm operators.

RAG AI Synthesis & Academic Attribution:

DO levels remained consistently above 5.0 mg/L via automated relay activation; average notification latency was 1.4 seconds.

System Capabilities

Built for Real Academic Discovery

RE-CAPS is not just a digital catalog — it is a complete, production-grade research platform built with modern cloud and AI infrastructure.

Dual Search Engine

Instant Boolean filtering by year, program, and adviser combined with Pinecone vector semantic search for contextual queries.

4-Tier Cascading AI

Resilient multi-model fallback across Mistral, Groq, Google Gemini, and OpenRouter, streaming answers with real-time SSE.

Cloudinary Visual Gallery

High-resolution figure showcases, architecture diagrams, and hardware photos hosted with dynamic Cloudinary transformations.

Cloud & Guest Bookmarks

Save theses locally as a guest, then automatically merge your reading collection into Firestore when creating an account.

Role-Based Access Control

Tailored for Every Campus Stakeholder

RE-CAPS serves four distinct user groups with dedicated workflows, permissions, and specialized dashboards.

Undergraduate Researchers

Student Researcher

Students can search the repository using traditional filters or the AI-powered Pinecone vector search, read abstracts and key findings, save bookmarks, and export formatted citations.

Natural-language semantic search via Pinecone Vector Database
Conversational Q&A with the RAG Assistant grounded in CTU theses
Instant multi-format citation export (APA 7th, IEEE, MLA, Chicago, BibTeX)
Personal Cloud Bookmarking synced across devices

Start Researching

Academic Attribution

Instant Multi-Format Citation Playground

Maintaining academic integrity is seamless with 1-click citation export. Select a format below to preview the formatted reference for a sample CTU capstone study.

Cadaro, J., Cabardo, C., Conde, C., De Jesus, A., & Ompoy, R. (2025). IoT-Driven Water Quality Monitoring and Automated Aeration for Coastal Aquaculture in Northern Cebu. Cebu Technological University — Daanbantayan Campus Library.

Supports direct copy & export across all project detail views in RE-CAPS.

Under the Hood

Production-Grade Modern Tech Stack

RE-CAPS is architected with a decoupled full-stack model, combining high-speed vector retrieval with server-sent event streaming and cloud storage.

Vector Database & AI Engine

Pinecone Vector DB

recaps-projects-search index (multilingual-e5-large)

4-Tier AI Engine

Mistral → Groq → Gemini → OpenRouter cascading LLMs

Backend & Cloud Database

Node.js & Express

REST API, SSE streaming, and Pinecone vector sync

Google Firebase

Firestore NoSQL, Firebase Auth (RBAC), and Hosting

Digital Assets & Communications

Cloudinary CDN

Cloud image hosting, thumbnail transforms, and lightbox

Resend & NodeMailer

Two-factor OTP email verification and feedback routing

Academic Institution

CTU Daanbantayan Campus Library

CTU
DBN

Cebu Technological University — Daanbantayan Campus

Located in Agujo, Daanbantayan, Cebu, Philippines. The campus library serves as the central scholarly repository for students, faculty, and researchers. RE-CAPS bridges physical accession records with 24/7 digital cloud intelligence, safeguarding institutional knowledge for generations to come.

Agujo, Daanbantayan, Cebu College of Technology BS in Information Technology A.Y. 2026–2027

The Engineering Team

Engineered by Group 2, BSIT 3A

College of Technology · Cebu Technological University — Daanbantayan Campus · A.Y. 2026–2027

John Cadaro

Project Lead & Backend Dev

Node.js · Pinecone · REST

Carmela Cabardo

AI Integration & RAG

Cascading LLMs · Embeddings

Christine Conde

Information Architecture

Metadata · Requirements

Allan De Jesus Jr.

UI/UX Design & Frontend

Responsive UI · Aesthetics

Rheina Ompoy

Database & QA Engineer

Firestore · Security Rules

Have feedback or found an issue?

Reach out to the RE-CAPS development team — we value your suggestions and bug reports.