KEO: Knowledge Extraction on OMIn via Knowledge Graphs and RAG for Safety-Critical Aviation Maintenance

We present Knowledge Extraction on OMIn (KEO), a domain-specific knowledge extraction and reasoning framework with large language models (LLMs) in safety-critical contexts. Using the Operations and Maintenance Intelligence (OMIn) dataset, we construct a QA benchmark spanning global sensemaking and actionable maintenance tasks. KEO builds a structured Knowledge Graph (KG) and integrates it into a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline, enabling more coherent, dataset-wide reasoning than traditional text-chunk RAG. We evaluate locally deployable LLMs (Gemma-3, Phi-4, Mistral-Nemo) and employ stronger models (GPT-4o, Llama-3.3) as judges. Experiments show that KEO markedly improves global sensemaking by revealing patterns and system-level insights, while text-chunk RAG remains effective for fine-grained procedural tasks requiring localized retrieval. These findings underscore the promise of KG-augmented LLMs for secure, domain-specific QA and their potential in high-stakes reasoning.