After well over 3 years of research and development, folks at SEMEDIA, Semantic Web and Multimedia research group at Universita' Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, Italy - announce the first public release of DBin 0.3 "Ficus".
DBin is a Semantic Web application/client/paradigm that allows users to gather in P2P communities around topics of interest and perform cooperative annotations.
DBin is:
* General purpose: It can address any community where metadata is important, be these the "Beer Lovers" or "Opera Purists".
* Both domain expert and end user oriented: Domain expert create special configuration packages called Brainlets, end users simply install suck packages and enjoy fully configured applications with a rich, domain specific user interface, appropriate ontologies, "pre made" queries to answer the common requests, URI minting policies so that new resources are created in a fashion as orderly as possible etc.
The following tools are provided:
- a P2P algorithm for exchanging annotations - a rich semantic web browser and ontology based editor, - a security infrastructure based on the Minimum Self Contained graph signing theory which assures the identity of those who inserted information - a filtering facility which filters according to the digital signatures and local policies, - generic tools such as a "semantic clipboard" to shuffle data back and forth among several facilities (queries, visualizers, import/Exporters etc) - Automatic upload and download of data attachments (files, pictures, media, long messages) from/to the Web using Web Publishing accounts
Open Source, released under the GNU Public License