This guide shows you how to create a knowledge store and optionally customize what the platform extracts during indexing.

Key concepts

Knowledge store: A persistent store of your videos and images plus the understanding the platform derives from them — spatiotemporal context, a typed ontology, and embeddings — that together enable corpus-level reasoning.
Ingestion configuration: An optional set of instructions that controls what the platform extracts during indexing. You can provide a natural-language description or a JSON schema.

Prerequisites

To use the platform, you need an API key:

1
If you don’t have an account, sign up for a free account.
2
Go to the API Keys page.
3
If you need to create a new key, select the Create API Key button. Enter a name and set the expiration period. The default is 12 months.
4
Select the Copy icon next to your key to copy it to your clipboard.
Depending on the programming language you are using, install the TwelveLabs SDK by entering one of the following commands:
```
$ pip install twelvelabs
```

Example

Copy and paste the code below, replacing the placeholders surrounded by <> with your values.

1 from twelvelabs import TwelveLabs
2 
3 client = TwelveLabs(api_key="<YOUR_API_KEY>")
4 
5 store = client.knowledge_stores.create(
6     name="<YOUR_KNOWLEDGE_STORE_NAME>",
7     # ingestion_config=...,  # Optional. Shape what the platform extracts during indexing.
8     # metadata={"team": "marketing", "quarter": "2026-Q1"},  # Optional. Up to 16 key-value pairs.
9 )
10 print(f"Knowledge store created: {store.id}")

Code explanation

Python

Node.js

To create a knowledge store, call the knowledge_stores.create method.
Parameters:

name: A name for the knowledge store.
(Optional) ingestion_config: An object that shapes what the platform extracts from your content during indexing. For the available approaches, see the Configure ingestion page.
(Optional) metadata: An object of up to 16 key-value pairs (string keys and values) to label and organize your stores.

Return value: An object of type KnowledgeStore with a field named id representing the unique identifier of the newly created knowledge store.

Next steps

Add assets to a knowledge store - add your uploaded assets to the knowledge store for indexing

Create a knowledge store