Greetings!
I’m pleased to announce the first public release of the Samizdat engine!
http://www.nongnu.org/samizdat/
Samizdat is a generic RDF-based engine for building collaboration and
open publishing web sites. Samizdat will let everyone publish, view,
comment, edit, and aggregate text and multimedia resources, vote on
ratings and classifications, filter resources by flexible sets of
criteria, cooperate and coordinate on all kinds of activities (see
Design Goals document for details). Samizdat intends to promote
values of freedom, openness, equality, and cooperation.
Samizdat builds its underlying data model on RDF (Resource
Description Framework), and defines a schema of resource classes and
properties for core concepts of a Samizdat site: member, message,
thread, tag, proposition, vote, version, part, and so on (see
Concepts document). Open nature of RDF allows to add new metadata and
new uses of site resources without effort, and to transparently
interoperate with diverse set of applications supporting this
standard.
Samizdat project was inspired by Matthew Arnison’s Open Publishing
initiative and Active engine used by the IndyMedia.org project, and
by rusty’s Scoop engine used by Kuro5hin.org and other sites (see
References document). It differs from other advanced open publishing
engines, such as Active2 or MirCode, in that it uses RDF model from
the ground up and targets other domains beyond publishing, such as
coordination, education, and material items exchange.
Samizdat 0.0.1 is the first version that includes basic RDF search query
construction UI. Other functionality covered by this version includes:
registering site members, publishing and replying to messages, voting
for standard tags on resources.
Samizdat’s RDF model was presented at the third Open Source Content
Management conference in Cambridge[1], Samizdat’s RDF storage subsystem
will be presented at the First European Ruby Conference in Karlsruhe[2].
[1] http://oscom.org/Conferences/Cambridge/
[2] http://www.approximity.com/euruko03
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Dmitry Borodaenko