factoid

factoid: read, manipulate and save factoids

factoid is a Ruby library to manipulate factoids and entitoids inside Ruby applications without touching the their XML representations.

What is a factoid?

Factoids and Entitoids are representations of pieces of information about a certain entity. These representations not only store the information itself, but also keep track of provenance (who stated something, where, when) and context (under which assumption is a certain piece of information valid?). Using factoids one can store and manage different values for the same property of an entity.

For example, instead of just storing that

composer with ID 14 has property 'name' = 'Frédéric Chopin'

using factoids one can say

there is a composer with ID 14

Wikipedia says that composer#14 has

• a property 'name',
• with context 'language' = 'fra',
• and value 'Frédéric Chopin'.

Book with ISBN 9780007351824 says that composer#14 has

• a property 'name',
• with context 'language' = 'pol',
• and value 'Fryderyk Chopin'.

The name of composer 14 is then both Frédéric Chopin and Fryderyk Chopin depending on the context.

Factoids and entitoids are described more in depth at http://svario.it/factoid.

The factoid gem makes it possible to load and save factoids, to search and select factoids that match certain patterns and to access complex information in a simple way.

Examples

c14 = Factoid::Entitoid.from_xml('composer14.xml')

puts "Known names:"
puts
c.factoids('name').each do |fact|
	puts " #{fact.value} in #{fact.context['language']}"
puts "   (from #{fact.sources})"
puts
end

# Known names:
#
#  Frédéric Chopin in fra
#    (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frédéric_Chopin)
#  Fryderyk Chopin in pol
#    (from urn:isbn:9780007351824)

Requirements

factoid is based on Nokogiri and uses Addressable to manage URIs.

Install

Install the factoid gem using RubyGems

gem install factoid

or Bundler

# in Gemfile
gem 'factoid'

To use the factoid gem in your project, load it with

require 'factoid'

Author

• Gioele Barabucci http://svario.it/gioele (initial author)

Development

Code : http://svario.it/factoid/ruby (redirects to GitHub)

Report issues : http://svario.it/factoid/ruby/issues

Documentation : http://svario.it/factoid/ruby/docs

License

This is free software released into the public domain (CC0 license).

See the COPYING file or http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ for more details.