# Context design overview

A context turns your sources into queryable knowledge. Its manifest tells curation what to build, and curation produces two layers of knowledge, searchable chunks and distilled artifacts.

## The manifest

A _manifest_ is a single validated JSON document that describes how a context curates its sources into knowledge. One generic runtime reads it, the same for every context. Its main section, `curate`, defines how to build knowledge from the sources, what to chunk and embed, and which artifacts to derive. Change the manifest, change the behavior. A never-tuned context still works, because the schema ships sensible defaults.

You author a manifest through the [Nexus API](/guides/reference-authentication), supplying it in the `manifest` field when you create or update a context, then curating. You can start from a prebuilt template or write the types yourself:

- Start from a template, a prebuilt manifest for a common corpus shape, and adjust it. Nexus suggests templates that match your sources. To see the full catalog, use `GET /manifest/templates`.
- [Design your own manifest](/guides/the-knowledge-engine-design-your-own-manifest) by defining artifact and edge types directly.
- Configure [artifact formats](/guides/the-knowledge-engine-configure-artifact-formats) to write a type as prose or as a queryable SQLite table.

Curation executes the manifest against the sources. To change a context later, send a new manifest with `PUT /contexts/{slug}` and re-curate. The console can seed a context from a template for a quick start, but the full manifest surface is available only through the API.

## Knowledge layers

When Nexus curates a context, it builds two layers of knowledge:

### Chunks

Sources are split into spans and embedded for hybrid (semantic + keyword) search. Chunks are content-addressed, so editing a document re-embeds only what changed. Every query can fall back to chunks.

### Artifacts

Artifacts sit above the chunks. Each artifact has a _type_ and a _kind_, a _scope_, a _format_, _provenance_ linking back to its source chunks, and optional _edges_, which are typed, directed, source-cited relationships to other artifacts. The _type_ is the artifact's classification, defined by your manifest and shown in the console (a template might define types such as Note, Concept, Entity, and Workstream). The _kind_ is a built-in config within a type.

Corpus-scoped artifacts plus typed edges form a cross-document knowledge graph. Factual queries dive straight to chunks. Synthesizing or "connect-the-dots" queries enter at artifacts, walk the edges, then drill down to chunks for evidence.

## Artifact kinds

| Kind       | Scope                  | Description                                                                    |
| ---------- | ---------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| `summary`  | `corpus` or `document` | A condensed overview of the whole corpus or a single document.                 |
| `topic`    | `corpus`               | A theme or subject distilled across the sources.                               |
| `entity`   | `corpus`               | A named thing (account, person, product) with its relationships.               |
| `event`    | `corpus`               | Something that happened, often time-stamped, good for timelines and counts.    |
| `doc`      | `document`             | A per-document artifact, scoped to one source file.                            |
| `page`     | `document`             | A single source page, the finest grain, for exact quotes and figures.          |
| `glossary` | `corpus`               | A term-and-definition pair, collected across the corpus into a shared lexicon. |

## Artifact formats

Each artifact type is written in one of two formats: `markdown`, a prose file per artifact, or `sqlite`, rows in a queryable table with a column schema. To set a type's format and, for `sqlite`, its columns and keys, see [Configure artifact formats](/guides/the-knowledge-engine-configure-artifact-formats).

## Related pages

- [Design your own manifest](./the-knowledge-engine-design-your-own-manifest.md)
- [Configure artifact formats](./the-knowledge-engine-configure-artifact-formats.md)

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