Nexus: A Relationship Ledger for Research Computing

Nexus is the system of record for the relationships of Research Computing at the University of California, Riverside (UCR): a PostgreSQL knowledge graph of researchers, labs, departments, Google Cloud projects, assets and engagements, plus a ledger of the emails, meetings and decisions that touched them. I run it through the nexus command-line interface (CLI) and a hosted Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that lets AI assistants read it under a campus sign-in. On 28 October 2026 it held 972 researcher records, 408 organizational units, 176 cloud projects, 911 assets and 3,983 interactions. The code dates from 5 January 2026: 541 commits and 212 tags, the latest v0.1.233, with the code itself at version 0.1.235. Its direct ancestor, a database and helper script for people and interactions, started on 5 September 2025, so the continuous line is about 14 months. The main lesson is that a ledger is worth what its write rules are worth: the rules that every write goes through the CLI, and that AI output is staged before it becomes a record, mattered more than any feature. Field Notes technical report. Web edition: https://charles-forsyth.github.io/papers/2026-10-29-nexus-a-relationship-ledger-for-research-computing.html. This record holds the PDF (ACM sigconf, PDF/A-2b) and the LaTeX source.