---
title: Documents / Nodes | LlamaIndex OSS Documentation
---

## Concept

Document and Node objects are core abstractions within LlamaIndex.

A **Document** is a generic container around any data source - for instance, a PDF, an API output, or retrieved data from a database. They can be constructed manually, or created automatically via our data loaders. By default, a Document stores text along with some other attributes. Some of these are listed below.

- `metadata` - a dictionary of annotations that can be appended to the text.
- `relationships` - a dictionary containing relationships to other Documents/Nodes.

*Note*: We have beta support for allowing Documents to store images, and are actively working on improving its multimodal capabilities.

A **Node** represents a “chunk” of a source Document, whether that is a text chunk, an image, or other. Similar to Documents, they contain metadata and relationship information with other nodes.

Nodes are a first-class citizen in LlamaIndex. You can choose to define Nodes and all its attributes directly. You may also choose to “parse” source Documents into Nodes through our `NodeParser` classes. By default every Node derived from a Document will inherit the same metadata from that Document (e.g. a “file\_name” filed in the Document is propagated to every Node).

## Usage Pattern

Here are some simple snippets to get started with Documents and Nodes.

#### Documents

```
from llama_index.core import Document, VectorStoreIndex


text_list = [text1, text2, ...]
documents = [Document(text=t) for t in text_list]


# build index
index = VectorStoreIndex.from_documents(documents)
```

#### Nodes

```
from llama_index.core.node_parser import SentenceSplitter


# load documents
...


# parse nodes
parser = SentenceSplitter()
nodes = parser.get_nodes_from_documents(documents)


# build index
index = VectorStoreIndex(nodes)
```

### Document/Node Usage

Take a look at our in-depth guides for more details on how to use Documents/Nodes.

- [Using Documents](/python/framework/module_guides/loading/documents_and_nodes/usage_documents/index.md)
- [Using Nodes](/python/framework/module_guides/loading/documents_and_nodes/usage_nodes/index.md)
- [Ingestion Pipeline](/python/framework/module_guides/loading/ingestion_pipeline/index.md)