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.

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, 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 by defining artifact and edge types directly.
• 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.

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

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 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.

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.