JamesGottlieb

If you’re familiar with MVC design, or at least with Ruby on Rails, then you’ve heard of CRUD: create, read, update, delete. These are the basic operations that are possible for data. There are various ways to do each of them, but these four are at the heart of any data-driven web application.

The Fabulator is a data-driven web application engine, so it makes sense that it should support the four CRUD operations. Since the database is essentially an RDF model, we need to map CRUD to RDF.

In a post from quite a while back, I talk about eXtensible State Machines, a way to reduce a web application to an XML document. The original implementation was a stand-alone web application environment/framework written in Perl. The web has evolved since that initial work. We now have web 2.0, Ruby on Rails, and content management systems that are easy to extend (e.g., Radiant).

Michael Godwin, General Counsel, Wikipedia Foundation, is on campus today visiting with various digital humanities groups and giving a talk titled, "After the Revolution." I've been thinking about the role of libraries and the Internet and academic responses to Wikipedia.

Since starting in the College of Liberal Arts in November, 2007, as the new lead developer for digital humanities, I've been putting together some design ideas and initial code towards a Digital Resources Workbench.

The NEH and other U.S. federal government agencies are pushing the digital humanities projects to result in something that can be shared. If this is an application that people can use, especially an application that resides on a central server, then the NEH is also wanting provisions for long-term maintenance. Ultimately, digital humanities projects should seek to be a resource that other scholarly work can build on. In this post, I want to explore what this might mean for web-based applications.