Skip to main content
Pinecone Nexus compiles your data into queryable knowledge that AI agents reach through a single interface. This page defines the core concepts and how they fit together, from the sources you bring in to the answers agents get back. For a high-level diagram of how they connect, see How Nexus works.

​
Sources

Sources are your data, wherever it lives: docs and wikis, databases, APIs and SaaS, object storage, event streams, and code repos. Upload files directly, pull from a public Hugging Face or GitHub repository URL, or connect a Box or Google Drive account through a connector. Import and manage sources from a context’s Sources tab, using + Add source.

​
Workspace

A workspace is the top-level container you work in. It holds your contexts and the tasks that build and query them. It’s backed by a Pinecone project, which provides identity and access and is the tenancy boundary. You can have more than one workspace, each with a name that’s unique within its Pinecone project.

​
Context

A context is the unit of knowledge: Sources → Manifest → Knowledge. The manifest turns sources into knowledge. You create one context per dataset, and a query reads one or more. A context holds up to 10 GB across 100,000 files, with each file up to 250 MB.

​
Manifest

A manifest is the JSON plan that turns a context’s sources into knowledge, so you configure a context instead of writing code. It defines what to chunk, embed, and distill into artifacts, and curation runs it. Shape it when you set up a context, or edit it later from the context’s Manifest tab. More on context design.

​
Tasks and workflows

A task runs a workflow in a sandbox. Import ingests and cleans sources, Curate builds artifacts per the manifest, Explore suggests a manifest from your sources, and Optimize self-tunes the manifest from real query traffic. Search answers a query via KnowQL. Each workflow may ensemble multiple models as needed. Watch curation and query spend under Activity.

​
Artifacts (the knowledge)

Artifacts are the condensed knowledge that curation produces. Each artifact has a type (its classification, shown in the console) and a kind (a config within the type), plus a scope and provenance, and can be linked to others by typed edges into a knowledge graph. Browse them by type on a context’s Knowledge tab. See the artifact reference.

​
Query

A query is a question asked against one or more curated contexts, and it’s the single interface into Pinecone Nexus. Nexus plans its own retrieval and answers with citations. Query a single context from its Query this context box, or drive it from your own code via the Nexus API. See the quickstart.

​
KnowQL

KnowQL is the declarative query language agents use to query Nexus. A KnowQL query names a scope (the contexts to read) and an ask (the question), plus an optional typed shape for structured output. Nexus plans and runs its own retrieval, then returns a grounded, cited answer.

​
Sessions

A session is a multi-turn conversation. A single query is one turn: a question in, an answer out. A session keeps state across turns, so follow-up questions resolve against what came before, and it can draw on more than one context at once. Start a session from Sessions in the sidebar, or from a context’s Query tab.