Introductory concepts
The ideas to know first
Before you build anything, learn five nouns. Almost everything in Nexma is one of them — or a combination of them. This page defines each in a paragraph and points you to its full reference.
Core concepts
Nexma is horizontal infrastructure: one agent, one filesystem, one map, reconfigured per domain by the world model you load. The five concepts below are the whole mental model. Read them once and the rest of the docs will click into place.
Jax
Jax is the spatial agent — the part of Nexma you talk to. You describe an outcome in plain language and Jax plans the work, runs it, and writes the result into your project. Jax never reaches for domain-specific buttons; it operates the world through eight generic primitives — Read, Write, Edit, Delete, Glob, Grep, Run, and Solve — the way a developer operates a filesystem. Domain knowledge comes from the world model, not from Jax's code.
See Jax overview.
Nexma DataStore
The Nexma DataStore is a persistent, queryable filesystem for the physical world. Every entity Nexma knows about — every closure, transformer, vehicle, sensor, or zone — is a file. Every relationship is a link. Every change is a diff. It is the single source of truth: the Globe, the side panels, the mobile app, and Jax all read from and write to the same DataStore. Nothing you see is a copy.
See Nexma DataStore.
Ontology
An Ontology is the typed world model. It defines what your world is made of — entity types, the relationships between them, the properties each carries, and the constraints that bind them. Constraints are first-class: splice ratios, voltage drop, pressure budgets, regulatory geometry. They are validated on every write, so the model stays correct as it grows. Load FTTH and Jax designs fiber; load water and it designs water. Same agent, different world.
See Ontology.
Skills
A Skill is a package of capability targeting an Ontology. It bundles Jax's prompt, tool bindings, validators, examples, and the UI surface that goes with them. One project binds one Ontology and any number of Skills. Skills are versioned the way code is versioned and they compose — add FTTH Network Design today, add an investigation skill tomorrow, each a swappable expansion of the same agent.
See Skills overview.
The Globe
The Globe is Nexma's map-native canvas — a 3D-capable basemap with your project's layers rendered on top. It is the inverse of dashboard-on-top-of-GIS: the map is the primary surface, and inspectors, charts, and the Jax chat slide in around it. Click any feature to read its full record; drag a vertex to write a change. Anything in your project with geometry renders here automatically.
See The workspace.
Projects and Sessions
Two more words tie it together. A Project is the container that binds an Ontology, its Skills, and all spatial state in the DataStore — your business as code. A Session is a single Jax conversation inside a project, like a thread of work. You can run several sessions against the same project, and switching to a different project opens a new tab.
Where to go next
- Put it into practice with the Quickstart.
- See how the pieces render together in The workspace.
- Go deeper on the foundation in Architecture overview.
- Skim the Glossary for the full vocabulary.