From: Dmitry Borodaenko <d.borodaenko@...>
Date: 2003-06-13T00:14:00+09:00
Subject: [ANN] Samizdat 0.0.1: RDF-based open publishing engine

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

-- 
Dmitry Borodaenko