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.

News

2005-02-11: Samizdat RDF Storage 0.1 is released.

Due to numerous requests from the public, Samizdat RDF Storage module is now released as a stand-alone library. The module provides optimized storage of RDF data in relational database (PostgreSQL) and is used by Samizdat engine as its main data storage.

2004-10-22: Samizdat 0.5.4 is released.

In this version, front page layout was changed to the more familiar vertial split with the main column featuring focuses and right column running recent updates in the open publishing wire. New moderation facility allows to take over messages, displace their contents completely, and block member accounts. More new features: alternative CSS theme Indy is added and now is selectable from the Settings page; Belarussian translation is added; database connection is now configurable and allows to run multiple Samizdat instances on a single server; oversize titles and descriptions are now truncated.

2004-09-24: Demo site at Cat@lyst is back online.

With generous help from Andy Nicholson, latest Samizdat version is now running at the same location.

2004-09-20: Samizdat 0.5.3 is released.

Starting with this version, Samizdat can send out email: currently, it is used to recover lost passwords and to confirm that member email address is real. Email addresses are now unique, making it more difficult to cheat using throwaway accounts. Other changes include new dc:description message property for attaching article abstract, thumbnail image, or table of contents to a message, new preferences infrastructure allowing to add more server-side member settings in the future, and the inevitable database schema change.

2004-09-20: Couple of whitepapers on Samizdat from the RDF perspective.

The papers "Model for Collaborative Decision Making Based on RDF Reification" and "Accessing Relational Data with RDF Queries and Assertions" where submitted to several RDF-related conferences earlier this year, but where accepted by none, and thus are now made freely available online.

2004-08-04: New demo site is now online.

Demo site using Samizdat is deployed at Boblycat by Eugene Zaikonnikov.

2004-07-05: Samizdat 0.5.2 is released.

This version adds Wiki functionality to Samizdat, allowing to edit messages and track history of changes. Messages may use Textile format for advanced hypertext markup, editing may be limited to the original creator or open for all site members. Other highlights of this release are FastCGI support, configurable site logo, multiple usability improvements, and the usual bunch of bugfixes. Once again, database schema is slightly changed.

2004-03-18: Samizdat 0.5.1 "Paris Commune" release is out.

This release is dedicated to 133rd anniversary of the Paris Commune. Main feature of this version is i18n support, with Russian translation already in place. Other improvements include ability to work as plain CGI without mod_ruby, support for Windows/Cygwin, massive speed increase, and a long list of bugfixes. Database schema is changed again, but this time it is trivial to migrate from the previous version.

2003-12-01: Samizdat 0.5.0 is released.

This version introduces basic focus management, completing the minimal set of features required for an open publishing part of the engine, and making Samizdat ready for public beta testing. Other major changes in this release include Pingback support, many user interface improvements, another rewrite of multimedia upload, testing framework, and more.

2003-11-18: Demo site is available.

Demo site using Samizdat is deployed at Cat@lyst by Andy Nicholson.

2003-10-17: samizdat-devel mailing list is created.

The mailing list is dedicated to development of the Samizdat collaboration and open publishing engine. Secondary list topics include Samizdat demployment, usage, and other related issues.

2003-09-01: Samizdat 0.0.4 is released.

This version allows to upload multimedia messages, including images and verbatim plain text, and introduces publishing of user-defined queries in form of "application/x-squish" messages. When migrating from older versions, Samizdat database should be dropped and recreated from scratch because of incompatible database schema change: content is now stored as a blob. In addition, file upload feature relies on StringIO module that is available as part of the Ruby 1.8 or can be installed separately from the Ruby Shim library for Ruby 1.6.

2003-08-08: Samizdat 0.0.3 is released.

In this version, query construction UI is added, allowing to compose and modify search queries more conveniently and without having to manually edit raw Squish. Other major changes include switch to Unicode UTF-8 as default encoding, great improvement of browsers support in CSS, more code refactoring. Many minor bugs and inconsistencies are fixed, UI is enhanced in several places.

2003-07-14: Samizdat 0.0.2 is released.

This version implements query validation and security limits, making execution of user-defined search queries safer. Other changes include schema improvements (better integration of Samizdat RDF schema with Dublin Core, separate namespace for tags, switch from RDF/XML to more readable N3 notation), enhanced search result display (resource rendering is separated into a class), UI CSS clean-up, documentation updates. Access to utility classes is reorganized and simplified.

2003-06-12: Samizdat 0.0.1 is released.

This is the first version that includes basic RDF search query construction UI. Other functionality covered by this version includes: registering site members, publishing and replying to messages, voting for standard tags on resources.