The Dithaka Resource concept

Inspired by RDF (Resource Descriptor Framework), Resources are placeholders for other objects, allowing us to create structures of objects that don't know about each other, in metadata. This provides various benefits in that you can add functionality to existing projects while reducing changes in existing code. It also means you can add Resource-aware objects to anything that can be represented by a Resource - which allows quite a lot of creativity in linking objects to each other, e.g. messages to documents, documents to events, events to projects, etc.

RDF consists out of Statements that represents information about a resource. Statements consists of:

  • a subject: which represents a resource
  • a object: which could be a resource or a string literal
  • a predicate: which represents the relationship between a subject and an object.

An example using RDF: Pieter likes tennis. The subject is Pieter, the object is tennis and the predicate is likes.

In Dithaka we create statements when users subscribe to the forum. The Subscriber has a subscription to a Forum. The subject is the subscriber (the user), the predicate is subscription and the Forum is the object. This is illustrated in the diagram below:

More information about RDF can be obtained from: