Introduction¶

(work in progress)

OpenAtlas is an open source database software developed especially to acquire, edit and manage research data from various fields of humanities.
This page (work in progress) tries to give an introduction for interested software developers.

What does it¶

• Acquire cultural heritage data: data can be entered via forms or imported through various means.
• Structure data. Many functions are available
• Connect data to other reference systems (e.g. Wikidata, GeoNames, ...)
• Data check functions
• Basic visualization to help with data entry
• Export data into various formats for further processing (e.g. social network analyses, archiving, ...) or display (e.g. maps)

Technologies¶

To provide a web interface to enable users to enter and structure data following technologies used are:

• Python (Python Software Foundation License), an interpreted, high-level, general-purpose programming language.
• Flask (BSD), a micro web framework, written in Python, with the ability to scale up to complex applications.
• PostgreSQL (PostgreSQL License), a free and open source relational database management system, with the
  • PostGIS extension (GPL 2 or later), a spatial database extender for PostgreSQL which adds support for geographic objects.
• HTML 5 with Jinja, a full-featured template engine for Python with full Unicode support.
• CSS with Bootstrap, a free and open source CSS framework.
• JavaScript

Development¶

We are using Git for version control and the main repository is located on GitHub

• Application structure, see manual
• Database structure, see manual

Standards¶

• Tests
• Coding standards

Model¶

Our data model is based on CIDOC CRM

CIDOC CRM¶

• OpenAtlas classes
• Shortcuts

Database¶

• Specification in database

Model in code¶

Views¶

Templates¶

• Jinja2

API¶