Rel4tion-Wiki/projects/idan.mdwn

<div class="infobox">
<h2>Links</h2>

<ul>
<li> [[News]]
<li> [[Releases]]
<li> [[Forum]]
<li> [[Tickets]]
</ul>
</div>

[[!toc]]

# Introduction

**Idan** is a high-level computer language for expressing information. It is
part of the Rel4tion project.

Idan can fully and uniformly describe any information expressed in terms of the
[[Smaoin]] model. While being flexible and powerful enough to express anything
you want, it sometimes requires specifying all the small details, and the
representation of some constructs is not as intuitive as possible. For example,
class hierarchies are expressed "linearly" (like in programming languages) and
not in a visual tree/graph form.

Idan is a good choice, perhaps the best, for most uses. It is currently the
main information language of **Rel4tion**. Perhaps there will be higher-level
languages in the future.

The syntax of Idan has similarities to
[[!wikipedia "Turtle (syntax)" desc=Turtle]], a language for RDF data. However
Idan and Turtle are not compatible and files written in one aren't likely to be
valid in the other, maybe unless a very limited subset of the language is used.

Smaoin itself is currently expressed as Idan files, in order for its basic
concepts to be used and extended by further information and ontologies. These
files also serve as examples of Idan. They are written under the framework
project [[/projects/Kadma]].

# Documentation

+ [[Tutorial]] - friendly guide for learning Idan
+ [[Manual]] - reference material with explanations and examples
+ [[Definition]] - technical precise definition of Idan
+ [[Vocabulary Template|vocab-template.idan]] - easy start for ontologies and
  vocabularies
+ [[Editor Support|editor-support]] - syntax highlighting and editing modes for
  Idan, in Vim and Emacs and other editors
+ [[Syntax Highlighting|syntax-highlighting]] - colored rendering of Idan code
  to various presentation formats, and support in the various syntax
  highlighting engines

# Software

- [[/projects/language-idan]] - Idan parser and writer library

# Data

These are the Smaoin information documents provided with Idan. See
[[here|data]].

# Community

For now, see the [[/contact]] page.

# Copying

All the data files and specifications for Idan are free culture works. All the
related software is free software.

# Bugs, Ideas, Tasks and Decisions

See these:

- [[tickets]]
- [[decisions]]

Also the following documents. They are a bit old and may be out of date.

+ [[design-goals]]
+ [[description-convention]]
+ [[i18n]]
+ [[inference]]
+ [[label-syntax]]
+ [[languages]]
+ [[layers]]
+ [[links]]
+ [[statement-identifiers]]