Introduction

Digita is happy to announce the alpha version of our new open source project: Semantic Components or SemCom in short.

So what is the motivation behind this product?

Well, we noticed that our developers ran across several important issues when building Solid apps.

On the one hand, when they were developing generic applications to let users browse through the data in Solid pods, such as a data browser, they ran into the issue that they could simply not foresee every kind of data at development time.

For example, when we started to get some customers who asked us to do some proof of concepts for them, we noticed that each of those customers had very different use cases for Solid in mind. And, of course each of those use cases required us to store very diverse types of data in Solid pods. Types of data that we could not have imagined when developing Inox.

On the other hand, when they were developing specific applications for a well-defined use case, we noticed that we had to create components to show the same data over and over again. For example, almost any application that we build has to render a person’s identity data such as his or her name and email.

This is where SemCom kicks in. SemCom is a specification and a set of software tools so app components that are meant to render specific data types can be dynamically bound in Solid apps such as data browsers at runtime.

How to get started?

You can download and access the source code of SemCom via Github. You can access the documentation on SemCom using Digita Docs and watch introductory videos on YouTube. The source code also contains a demo which is explained in a video series. You can also learn about SemCom by studying its implementations. SemCom is currently used by Solid CRS: a collection registration system for small heritage foundations developed and hosted by the Dutch Digital Heritage Network.

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