Donantonio, an architecture for automated electronic publishing (draft)

Ismael Olea
mailto:olea@hispalinux.es

v0.01 1999-09-02


The very basic ideas for an architecture for publishing and maintaining all kind e-libraries using known standards as XML, RDF, Dublin Core, etc.

1. At the beginning was LuCAS

LuCAS is one of the projects involved in LDP-es. In the time of developing the v3.0 I saw the need of a homogenic way of document management in a distributed Internet way and finding information from electronic repositories.

Time before, stimulated by some people from the Spanish Linux Community I've started to study Internet bibliographic standards.

These are my ideas about it.

Please excuse my bad English. I do the best that I can.

2. The needs of a document project

3. The LDP case

3.1 A technical background and tools for authoring support.

The LDP choosed using of SGML techniques. These are perfect.

It'll move to DocBook as a complete authoring structured system. This is perfect too if we'll have a complete set of tools to create DB documents and a filters to the most popular and useful formats.

3.2 A normalized style guide, including a glossary.

Some of us at LDP-es see this need. We have a primitive Spanish glossary but I see clear the need of a style guide: people new to document creation needs information about how create good documents.

In the Spanish case this is a work almost started today.

3.3 A revision control system, for distributed authoring, updating and QA.

There are some projects to create a model for this tasks. From LDP-es the Insflug project had announced Ofelia, a web system developed for this tasks.

3.4 An automatic distributed publishing system (with facilities of information searching/retrieval).

This is the target idea of this paper.

4. Requeriments for an automatic distributed publishing architecture

Inside my own vision of software engineering it must be accordant to the next rules:

5. Architecture versus application.

This paper is focused in architecture only. The idea is to design a set of conventions and rules to build a working environment to develop applied publishing tools.

For this cause I'll try not to say too much about the Metalab/LDP publishing system. Indeed, the designing work for these appliances will help to refine Donantonio to get a multi true purpose and generalized architecture.

6. Donantonio definitions

6.1 Elements

Resource

file or a document located via an URL.

Description

a RDF file meta-data, located via an URL.

Repository

collection of resources or collection of resources' instances.

Library

collection of descriptions or collection of descriptions' instances.

6.2 Agent tasks

These tasks aren't completely defined yet.

Server

software acting as a server

Client

software acting as a client

Proxy

Proxy between two servers or between a server and a client

6.3 Actions

These are the "atomic actions":

Resource download

the act of downloading a resource referred by an URL via an Internet transfer protocol.

Resource mirroring

the act of mirroring (and sincronicing) a resource referred by an URL via an Internet transfer protocol.

Description download

the act of downloading a description referred by an URL via an Internet transfer protocol.

Description mirroring

the act of mirroring (and sincronicing) a description referred by an URL via an Internet transfer protocol.

Petition

a query on a transport layer (mime+http??).

Answer

of a query on a transport layer (mime+http??). It can contains a view.

And these are the "composed actions"

Library mirroring

TACA

Repository mirroring

TACA

Distributed query

TACA

6.4 Relations

Projection

relational representation in SQL language of a RDF schema.

Query

SQL query to a projection.

View

a set of one or more description Urls.

7. The Donantonio metaphor

7.1 The astral metaphor

An incomplete metaphor of the things Donantonio could support is the "astral metaphor".

If we believe to some astrologists, the physical body has an astral body (the soul). In some circumstances the soul can travel without its physical body. But soul and body are linked with a silver bow. The astral body (the soul) can travel to any place of the world and ever is linked to his body, which is still sleeping somewhere on the Earth. But if the silver bow get broken, the soul is not linked to its body anymore. It's the death for its body.

7.2 Equivalence between Donantonio metaphor and the astral metaphor

For Donantonio thinking, documents are the body, descriptions are the astral bodies of its documents and are linked to it by a URL. If the link get broken the description lost all is usefulness and the documents die forgotten in somebody hard disk.

The principal idea is that while resources are sleeping in some place, their souls (meta-data descriptions) are traveling along the world, being processed and shared between Donantonio applications. Donantonio add the ubiquity faculty letting several duplicated souls for a only resource.

The soul's movememt capabilities are configured by the relations between agents. Movement makes happen in the form of actions, performed by agents.

7.3 Practical consequences

8. Who's Don Antonio?

Don Antonio is the librarian of the high school were I had my bachelor degree.

I like this name because it's different and sounds funny :-)

9. Bibliography

10. Change-log

v0.0, first release in English