RAA - samizdat/0.5.1

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, 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 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.