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conv.mdwn

[[!tag /news]] [[!meta title=“Conversions a.k.a What is Going On”]]

Intro

This morning I asked myself: If someone is interested in Rel4tion and is trying to follow the progress, how would they know what’s being done?

At least for the current work, updates can be followed by:

Watching the wiki for changes, in particular in the [[/projects]] section
Watching [[/access/darcs]] repository changes

I don’t expect anyone to actually do these things. Each project has a news section, and there’s a roadmap, and there is a work-in-progress page. But I rarely make per-project news items or update the work-in-progress page. Since some things happened since the last news update about my Haskell coding, I decided to write a news update.

Overview

I made some releases to Hackage. The packages are probably quite useless right now, because they’re mostly helpers and tools for the actual parsers and APIs. The higher-level components being developed are:

[[/projects/language-kort]] - parser and writer for the [[/projects/Kort]] language. While Kort files aren’t very useful to human eyes or hands directly, their syntax is very simple and they can be a basis for datastore APIs which application developers can use.
[[/projects/language-idan]] - parser and writer for the [[/projects/Idan]] language. Idan’s syntax is rich and much more complex than Kort. It will probably be implemented gradually. It also requires several Razom subsystems to be written, such as all the localization features.
[[/projects/razom-basic-store]] - a simple API for basic usage of Smaoin semantic datastores

The plan right now is to implement basic datastores using simple in-memory graphs, Kort files and eventually Idan files too. Then, if it fits into later schedules and plans, I’ll take some existing application and implement Smaoin support for it. Just something minimal to see and show the system in action, do some real-world testing and get feedback.

What’s Going On

I’m working on language-kort’s ticket #[[/projects/language-kort/tickets/3]], writing data conversions for use in the writer and in conversions to and from the Smaoin data types. After this, making the package ready for testing and the first release should be trivial.

In the process, I’m creating some utility packages. They have project pages, darcs repos and Hackage releases too. When things get closer to being useful, I’ll write a tutorial to explain how to do things with Smaoin and how all these components work together.

Development is going a bit slowly due to various reasons, but overall I’m making progress. I also feel it’s becoming reasonably easy to join and contribute, with the various Haskell components in place and with the projects section somewhat organized. If anyone wishes to help, don’t hesitate to ask :)

Rel4tion

Just in case you’re not sure what all of this is good for, here’s a quick reminder.

Smaoin is a semantic information model, more-or-less in the same category as RDF and Gellish. Razom is an information access and management interface based on Smaoin. Rel4tion is a semantic information computing model and environment whose core is Razom. The current development work is implementing the tools needed for a basic version of Razom to be released.

I started this project mainly because existing solutions, including RDF, didn’t seem to fit and solve the problems I saw. Some goals and philosophy of Rel4tion are:

Aim for semantic-everything, not just semantic-web. Especially focus on the user side, desktop and personal productivity technologies, since RDF is hardly used for this (but has very wide use in server-side and corporate IT) but the potential is huge. At the same time develop server-side tools and offer the semantic model as an alternative to SQL
Clean model with statement identifiers built-in, opaque identifiers, separate localization layer, unified namespace model and more
Work towards decentralized and distributed systems, free and independent access to information and IT, empowering the user
Focus on education of both developers and users, to spread the semantic model’s basics, eventually hoping to get the semantic model concepts into the most common graphical user applications’ UIs
Develop theory and models to guide the practical tools’ development and evolution. Research, compare, try things, fail and improve. Explore new models and options.
Non-profit. Work for the community’s need, for free software’s need. Not for industry’s need (unless the industry works for the user).
Community project made by “volunteers”, no corporate interest. Be free of complicated work protocols and very-very-slowly changing standard documents. Aim to work with the community and grow bottom-up. Welcome people of diverse backgrounds.
Everyone can participate. No papers, official document, proven experience or anything like that is required.
Peace, love and global brotherhood :-)

[[!meta author=fr33domlover]]

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