CenterGraph is a framework to develop modern web applications that have RDF and SHACL at their core. It has end-to-end type safety with a SHACL to TypeScript type converter, an easy React SDK and an opinionated setup so that it will be easy to update and maintain your apps.
The background
The internet has changed from its tiny start to a big web where a couple of big players dominate the markets. In this context many things have been tried to make it possible to have small interconnected things. One of the initiatives that I love is the semantic web / linked data. I love the idea of easily connecting to a datasource, slowly discovering what kind of data it has and then using it for my own purpose.
A small example of this is my Influence app. It uses data from DBpedia, an extract from Wikipedia that uses RDF.
This is what I would love to see for organisation or communities too. It would be wonderful to be able to log into somewhere with your organisation account and carry your data with you. In this regard, CenterGraph is very similar to Solid, but it is meant for organisation / communities and not for individual people.
The vision is that inside of a CenterGraph instance you can add groups of people and / or users. These groups themselves can have sub groups too.
Why would you use it
- It is an offline first solution for creating apps
- You can use it to create a community based system
- The framework is data, back-end to front-end, no need to create complex systems outside of your business logic
- It encourages re-use of data and in general the idea of linked data
- It encourages heavy front-end logic instead of heavy back-ends