Welcome to annalist.net
Annalist demo server (release 0.5.16).
Overview
The goal of Annalist is to make it easy for individuals and small teams to create and share linked data on the web, and to experiment with linked information designs.
Annalist is a Linked Data Notebook, supporting collection, organization and sharing of structured and semi-structured data. The name "Annalist" derives from "a person who writes annals".
Annalist can be used for diverse purposes, and in particular has been motivated by the needs of small academic research groups, and personal information management. It is a self-hostable, web-based tool that will, "out-of-the-box", allow creation and management of web accessible, linked data without prior design of its structure and with no programming required.
As such, it is designed to enable:
- Easy data creation and management: data entry, modification and organization of small data records.
- Flexible data: new record types and fields can be added as required.
- Sharable data: uses JSON, a textual, easy to read and easy to process file format that can be shared by web, email, file transfer, version management system, memory stick, etc.
- Remixable data: uses entity records that can be first class participants in a wider ecosystem of linked data, with links in and links out.
Links
- Software repository: Annalist software and documentation on GitHub.
- Getting started: summary instructions for installing and setting up Annalist.
- Tutorial: describes basic Annalist operations.
- Tutorial data in Annalist.
- Installing and setting up Annalist: a more detailed guide to installing and setting up Annalist.
- Guide to using Annalist.
- Workshop paper, presented at the 2016 Linked Data on the Web (LDoW 2016) workshop. Also [Available from GitHub](https://github.com/gklyne/annalist/blob/master/documents/publications/LDOW2016-paper/Annalist-paper-ACMSIG.pdf).
- LDoW 2016 workshop presentation.
Feedback
Please feel free to try using the demonstrator at demo.annalist.net, and send any feedback to the Annalist discussion group or the issue tracker for the Annalist GitHub project.
There is some browseable data there. The CruisingLog data is a snapshot of some real Annalist application data I'm working on.
Another demo project is creating a linked data version of the "digital footprint" of the Carolan Guitar, which is part of an ongoing activity to use Annalist to prototype Digital Music Objects for the FAST Project.
If you log in using Google+ credentials, you can create a new Annalist data collection and play with it, but please be aware this is a development and demonstration platform and data may be reset at any time.
Resources
Source code and documentation is available from the Annalist GitHub repository (github.com/gklyne/annalist).
The raw JSON-LD data that underlies the Annalist demo site can be viewed at annalist.net/annalist_sitedata/. User data collections are contained in subdirectory c, with a subdirectory for each separate collection. A special collection _annalist_site contains site-wide configuration data and definitions.
Other resources on this server
Demonstration videos
Some of these screencasts are rather dated - the Annalist tutorial mentioned above might be a more useful introduction.
-
Initializing Annalist site data
(1m47s) - shows the procedure for first-time initialization of new Annalist site data using the
annalist-managerutility. -
Log in and and create first collection
(3m32s) - steps through an initial login using the
adminuser created previously, create a new collection and create permissions for a Google-authenticated user to modify that collection. - Initial entry of data in a new collection (3m32s) - covers adding data to a new collection, and adding data record fields beyond the initial default fields.
- Configure types and record views in a data collection (3m46s) - customize a collectionto reflect the data it contains through the addition of record types and record views.
- Configure list view and default display (3m51s) - customize collection content listings and defaults to simplify the entry of new data.
Scripts for the above demonstration sequences, to allow the operations shown to be performed locally, can be found at github.com/gklyne/annalist/blob/master/documents/demo-script.md.
There is also the Original demonstration screencast: 6 minute video showing Annalist used to create and start populating a simple catalogue of musical instruments.
Software download
The easiest way to obftain the software is generally to install it from PyPI using the Python pip utility. See the Annalist getting started page.
-
Annalist-0.5.16:
Downloadable software installation kit. Needs Python 2.7.15,
virtualenvandpip. Install usingpipinto a newly created Python virtual environment. (Can also be used with Python 3.7 if dependencies are appropriately patched.) - Annalist-0.5.14 (older release).
- Annalist-0.5.12 (older release).
- Annalist-0.5.10 (older release).
- Annalist-0.5.8 (older release).
- Annalist-0.5.6 (older release).
- Annalist-0.5.4 (older release).
- Annalist-0.5.2 (older release).
- Annalist-0.5.0 (older release).
- Annalist-0.1.36 (older release).
- Annalist-0.1.34 (older release).
- Annalist-0.1.32 (older release).
- Annalist-0.1.30 (older release).
- Annalist-0.1.26 (older release).
- Annalist-0.1.24b (older release).
- Annalist-0.1.24a (older release).
- Annalist-0.1.24 (older release).
- Annalist-0.1.22 (older release).
- Annalist-0.1.20 (older release).
- Annalist-0.1.18 (older release).
- Annalist-0.1.16 (older release).
- Annalist-0.1.14 (older release).
- Annalist-0.1.12 (older release).
- Annalist-0.1.10 (older release).
- Annalist-0.1.8a (older release).
- Annalist-0.1.8 (older release).
- Annalist-0.1.6 (older release).
- Annalist-0.1.4 (older release).