Haystack is a project at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

to research and develop several

applications Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a ...

around

personal information management Personal information management (PIM) is the study and implementation of the activities that people perform in order to acquire or create, store, organize, maintain, retrieve, and use informational items such as documents (paper-based and digital ...

and the

Semantic Web The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable. To enable the encoding o ...

. The most notable of those applications is the Haystack client, a research personal information manager (PIM) and one of the first to be based on

semantic desktop In computer science, the semantic desktop is a collective term for ideas related to changing a computer's user interface and data handling capabilities so that data are more easily shared between different application software, applications or tas ...

technologies. The Haystack client is published as

open source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

under the

BSD license BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD lic ...

. Similar to the Chandler PIM, the Haystack system unifies handling different types of

unstructured information Unstructured data (or unstructured information) is information that either does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner. Unstructured information is typically text-heavy, but may contain data such as dates, nu ...

. This information has a common representation in RDF that is presented to users in a configurable human-readable way.

Adenine

Haystack was developed in the RDF-aware dynamic language Adenine which was created for the project. The language was named after the nuclease

adenine Adenine (, ) (nucleoside#List of nucleosides and corresponding nucleobases, symbol A or Ade) is a purine nucleotide base that is found in DNA, RNA, and Adenosine triphosphate, ATP. Usually a white crystalline subtance. The shape of adenine is ...

and is a

scripting language In computing, a script is a relatively short and simple set of instructions that typically automation, automate an otherwise manual process. The act of writing a script is called scripting. A scripting language or script language is a programming ...

that is

cross-platform Within computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several Computing platform, computing platforms. Some ...

. It is the perhaps the earliest example of a

homoiconic In computer programming, homoiconicity (from the Greek words ''homo-'' meaning "the same" and ''icon'' meaning "representation") is an informal property of some programming languages. A language is homoiconic if a program written in it can be manip ...

general graph (rather than list/tree) programming language. A substantial characteristic of Adenine is that this language possesses native support for the

Resource Description Framework The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a method to describe and exchange graph data. It was originally designed as a data model for metadata by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It provides a variety of syntax notations and formats, of whi ...

(RDF). The language constructs of Adenine are derived from Python and

Lisp Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized Polish notation#Explanation, prefix notation. Originally specified in the late 1950s, ...

. Adenine is written in RDF and thus also can be represented and written with RDF based syntaxes such as Notation3 (N3).

References

Haystack: per-user information environments
Eytan Adar, David Karger, Lynn Andrea Stein. Proceedings of the eighth international conference on Information and knowledge management, p. 413–422, November 2–06, 1999, Kansas City, Missouri, United States
Haystack: A Platform for Creating, Organizing and Visualizing Information Using RDF
Huynh, Karger, et al. 2002
Haystack Project summary

Belief layer for Haystack

External links

Active Haystack projects

Haystack
at the SIMILE project webpage

converted to IFCX Wings from th

which is now 404.
Adenine implementation
in Java extracted from MIT Haystack hosted on Sourceforge. Free personal information managers Massachusetts Institute of Technology software Semantic Web {{compu-soft-stub

Adenine

See also

References

External links