Haystack is a project at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern t ...

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 c ...

around

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

and the Semantic Web. 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 technologies. The Haystack client is published as

open source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Op ...

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 li ...

. Similar to the

Chandler Chandler or The Chandler may refer to: * Chandler (occupation), originally head of the medieval household office responsible for candles, now a person who makes or sells candles * Ship chandler, a dealer in supplies or equipment for ships Arts ...

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, num ...

. 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 nucleobase

adenine Adenine () (symbol A or Ade) is a nucleobase (a purine derivative). It is one of the four nucleobases in the nucleic acid of DNA that are represented by the letters G–C–A–T. The three others are guanine, cytosine and thymine. Its derivativ ...

and is a

scripting language A scripting language or script language is a programming language that is used to manipulate, customize, and automate the facilities of an existing system. Scripting languages are usually interpreted at runtime rather than compiled. A scripti ...

that is

cross-platform In 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 platforms. Some cross-platform software ...

. 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 a property of some programming languages. A language is homoiconic if a program written in it can be manipulated as ...

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 World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard originally designed as a data model for metadata. It has come to be used as a general method for description and exchange of graph data. RDF provides a variety of ...

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

Lisp A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech. Types * A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lispi ...

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

Notation3 Notation3, or N3 as it is more commonly known, is a shorthand non-XML serialization of Resource Description Framework models, designed with human-readability in mind: N3 is much more compact and readable than XML RDF notation. The format is being ...

(N3).

Active projects and recent research papers

References

Haystack: per-user information environments
Eytan Adar,

David Karger David Ron Karger (born May 1, 1967) is a professor of computer science and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory ( CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Education Karger received a Bachelor of A ...

, 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 Free personal information managers Massachusetts Institute of Technology software Semantic Web {{compu-soft-stub

Adenine

Active projects and recent research papers

See also

References

External links