OpenStructs is an education and distribution site dedicated to open source software for converting, managing, viewing and manipulating structured data. Structured data can represent any existing data struct from the simplest attribute-value pair formats to fully specified relational database schema.

All OpenStructs tools are premised on the canonical RDF (Resource Description Framework) data model. Thus, OpenStructs tools either convert existing data structures to RDF, extract structure from content as RDF, or manage and manipulate RDF. All OpenStructs tools and approaches are as compliant as possible with existing open standards from the W3C. The intent is to achieve maximum data and software interoperabililty.

The core software package is the structWSF Web services framework. This generally RESTful middleware provides the bridge between existing content and structure and content management systems and available indexing engines and RDF data stores. structWSF also provides a platform-independent means for distributed collaboration via an innovative dataset access paradigm. It has about twenty embedded Web services. It has linkages to the Drupal CMS via the conStruct SCS product.

A second major distribution from this site is irON, the instance record and Object Notation. irON is an abstract notation and associated vocabulary for specifying RDF triples and schema in non-RDF forms. Its purpose is to allow users and tools in non-RDF formats to stage interoperable datasets using RDF. The notation supports three serializations for writing RDF and schema in the formats of: JSON (irJSON); XML (irXML); or, comma-separated values (CSV) via spreadsheets (commON).

This OpenStructs Web site is meant to be a growing distribution point for contributed:

• New Web Services and Tools -- expansions of ongoing efforts and contributed modules
• Display Structs -- pre-formatted structured data display templates
• RDFizers -- converters from existing data structs and content to RDF
• Extractors -- wrappers for extracting RDF structured data from text and Web page content.

We welcome you to visit, download, explore and contribute. Please help make this community active and relevant!