CivicActions

An ambitious project, NINA (National Information Network for Artists)[1] serves to create a reusable tool for making the finding of information easier and more effective. Specifically geared for artist communities, but applicable to all search applications, NINA can let organizations quickly build quality data and make it accessible via search and web standards. NINA is nearly feature complete for version 1.0 and promises to bring several projects enhanced search and sharing functionality.

NINA is the meeting of Web 2.0 with the Semantic Web. What this means for the users of NINA is that some very powerful technologies are available[2]. A community group only needs to install NINA on their website, start entering data, change some configurations - and the information they want found is easily navigable, sharable, and searchable. Data entry works like it does in any application, except the way the data can be shared and presented is enhanced greatly.

There's a lot to understand technically with NINA. But it will be easy to recognize the advantages of using this software for the the next online database project for your organization. Stay tuned for updates and demos.

Cheers,
Jonathan

---
[1] I am the technical architect and lead developer on the project.

[2] As of this writing NINA is a standalone Drupal plugin. It depends on two other software packages: SONIA and ARC. ARC is an RDF store by Benjamin Nowack which is the fastest and most usable PHP RDF store available. An RDF store is like a special database which stores the data in RDF triples (RDF is a type of XML used in RSS for example) and is queried with SPARQL (instead of SQL). SONIA (Simple Ontology and Inference Algorithms) is an abstraction layer which makes using RDF stores for faceted search easier.