Samizdat: Co-op Engine
======================

Samizdat is a generic RDF-based engine for building collaboration and
open publishing web sites. Samizdat will let users cooperate and
coordinate on all kinds of activities, including media activism,
resource sharing, education and research, advocacy, etc., by allowing
everyone to publish, view, comment, edit, and aggregate text and
multimedia resources, vote on ratings and classifications, filter
resources by flexible sets of criteria (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, focus,
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 is free software and is built using free software, such as Ruby
programming language and PostgreSQL relational database management
system. All Samizdat source code and documentation can be redistributed
and/or modified under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
published by Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the license,
or (at your option) any later version.

Documentation

   install.txt:         Installation
   notes.txt:           News and Roadmap
   design-goals.txt:    Design Goals
   concepts.txt:        Concepts
   rdf-impl-report.txt: RDF Implementation Report
   rdf-storage.txt:     RDF Storage
   storage-impl.txt:    Storage Implementation
   references.txt:      References

Presentations

   oscom3_samizdat.xml: OSCOM3, May 2003, Cambridge, MA
   euruko2003_samizdat.xml: EuRuKo 2003, June 2003, Karlsruhe, DE

Papers

   collreif.tex: Model for Collaborative Decision Making Based on RDF
                 Reification, April 2004
   rel-rdf.tex:  Accessing Relational Data with RDF Queries and
                 Assertions, April 2004

Links

   http://www.nongnu.org/samizdat/
   http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/samizdat/
   http://raa.ruby-lang.org/list.rhtml?name=samizdat
   http://freshmeat.net/projects/samizdat/
   http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Devel/SamizdatEngine
   http://decentralist.cockroachcollective.org/~angdraug/samizdat/
   http://boblycat.org/~varjag/samizdat/

