Arkestra: semantic information publishing for organizations¶
by Daniele Procida
- Works at Cardiff University School of Medicine
- http://medicine.cf.ac.uk is his main site
- http://arkestra-project.org/
- http://readthedocs.org/docs/arkestra/
- slides: https://speakerdeck.com/u/evildmp/p/arkestra-at-djangocon-europe-2012
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:
- The Semantic Presentation Editor
- Special text editor that renders out things in a lovely, semantic fashion
- See https://bitbucket.org/spookylukey/semanticeditor/wiki/Home