Cited network paths — how entities connect

The cited path explainer answers one question: "how do these two entities connect?" Give it a start entity and a destination entity, and it returns the ordered chain of nodes between them, the relationship on each hop, and the source document(s) that establish each hop. It is a Team+ capability, gated the same way as the rest of Forum Network.

What you get back

An explained path is the node sequence from start to destination, with, for every hop:

• the relationship that links the two nodes (awards_to, subcontracts_to, led_by, regulated_by, mentioned_in, competes_with), and
• the source document id(s) that establish that hop.

Fully cited by contract

This is the moat surface — a graph answer that shows its sourcing. The path-finder skips uncited hops: every hop in a returned path is backed by a source row. You will never get a path that asserts a connection FedGrade can't point at a document for. If no fully-cited path exists within the hop budget, you get nothing rather than a speculative chain.

Using it

• Set the start and destination entities and an optional max-hop budget (1–6, default 4).
• Over the API at GET /api/network/path?from=…&to=…&maxHops=….
• As part of the query_entity_graph MCP tool, which walks an entity's relationship paths with the source row behind each edge.

Honest limits

The graph is a public-source aggregate. A path can only exist if the connecting relationships were observed in public data — private teaming agreements not filed in SAM are not represented. As with the rest of the graph, competes_with hops are heuristic (derived from co-bid history): treat them as a signal, not a fact.