Arkestra: semantic information publishing for organizations

by Daniele Procida

Note

Good talk but some slides had too many bullets.

What typically happens when working with a CMS

  • You have to repeat yourself
  • data gets wasted and lost
  • content & presentation becomes inconsistent
  • info in templates gets broken and petrifies
  • information ages, withers & dies
  • users play fast & loose
  • The larger the site the worse the problems get

His idea

Create a model of the real world

Informtation, not just data

  • information not useless stupid data
  • templates don’t hold information
  • Semantic modeling real-world relationships
  • user semantics!

Organization

  • Can you model a CMS based off an organization?

  • He created a concept of entity

  • Many interconnections of content and data

  • He did it on http://medicine.cf.ac.uk

    • Entities are associated with pages
    • Not entity needs to have a page
  • We did a very similar effort on http://science.nasa.gov/, but…

    • not so well organized.
    • grown organically during the course of a number of badly run meetings

Don’t waste people’s time

  • Make everything re-usable and re-use it
  • Make it easier to re-use then re-enter

Django-CMS and Arkestra

  • Django CMS & Arkestra grew up together
  • have been developed alongside each other
  • portions of Django CMS conceived as part of Arkestra
  • integration with pages, placeholders/plugins, menus

The Semantic Presentation Editor

The problem:

  • Create complex, flexible, multiple-column layouts
  • produce well-structured semantic HTML
  • Need no HTML/CSS skills

Solution: