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Installation instructions
Succinct Documentation for the Planetary System

Installation instructions

If you want to jump straight into technical details, the latest installation instructions are at DrupalPorting. The following sections give some background on the motivation and ideas behind the project.

Succinct Documentation for the Planetary System

The Planetary Core

The core of a planet consists of a set of (semantically interlinked and versioned) information items that we call "articles". Currently, articles are encoded in LaTeX (for legacy material), and sTeX (for semantically enhanced ones), but in the future more representation formats will be possible). Every article is accompanied by a discussion forum, which allows readers to ask and answer questions, give comments and suggest enhancements. ...more

Planetary Types

The Planetary System is quite flexible, thus it can be instantiated to a variety of information portals: PlanetMath and PlanetPhysics are topic-centered encyclopedias, planetGenCS is a course information system, Planet arXiv, a community reading portal, OAF an open archive for flexiformal mathematics, and finally the LATIN Logic Atlas a fully formal development platform for interoperable logical systems. We are using a testing deployment with the bleeding edge version of the Planetary System here, mainly for large-scale testing before deployment on the other planets. ...more

Planetary Access

The main functionality of an information portal is to give easy access to its information resources (the articles). The Planetary System supports multiple access methods. The simplest is "access-by-article-name" for encyclopedia-type planets. A more sophisticated one is the planetary bookshelf, where articles are organized as hierarchical, narrative (book-like) structures. The most semantic, and flexible access method is ontology-based access?, where the information resources are accessed by their semantic structures. ...more

Planetary Mechanics

The Planetary System is based on Vanilla Forums, a particularly well-engineered forum system which supports specialization by plugins. Our "Articles" extension gives us a LaTeX-based wiki for encyclopedia articles, each with a built-in discussion forum. The forum is fully LaTeX-enabled: formulae are automatically transformed into MathML for display in browsers by the LaTeXML transformer. Semantic articles are stored in the OMDoc format and provisioned by the TNTBase knowlege base using the JOMDoc library for human-oriented presentation. Version control is supplied by TNTBase via a Subversion plugin. Articles are instrumented with embedded semantic services via the JOBAD library. ...more

Planetary Licenses

LaTeXML is public domain where applicable, and is distributed without restrictions. The core of Vanilla Forums is GPL v2 or higher, see the file GPL distributed with Planetary. We're releasing our plugins under the GNU Affero GPL (see this overview page from the FSF, and the AGPL in the plugins directory in our source repository). Documentation (including this wiki) is Creative Commons By-SA 3.0, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/.

Planetary Guidebooks

Our "developer's handbook" with detailed documentation of the Planetary System is available here. We're keeping track of project milestones in the Roadmap on this Trac. This roadmap is kept in sync with a Featuremap. We also have some general-purpose tips for developers, and a succinct guide to Planets, Plugins, and their Installation.