Radix is a set of tools for tracking metadata and provenance of objects.

Metadata includes any information a person wants to attribute to an object, for example, the author of a book, the condition of a coin, or the company that printed a poster.

Provenance is a history of ownership and certification for an object. If Jill has an object appraised, then sells it to Joe, the provenance documents the who and when of those two transactions.

Radix seeks to track both, through a system of standardized descriptions and public key cryptography.

This repository provides proof of concept tools for the Radix system. It is not production ready, and users should expect it to change significantly!

Also: there are no command line tools. You're flying with alpha quality code, man.

A package corresponds with the object you're describing or tracking. A package is a directory containing metadata files about the object. Each file belongs to a person, allowing multiple people to provide information about the object and it's provenance.

The file that ties everything together within a package is the manifest.xml file, which incorporates other individual files to accommodate piecemeal additions to metadata and provenance.

Information about an object, from a particular person, is tracked in an XML file.

The structure of the XML file is defined by one (or more) XSD schema definitions, which can be found in the schema/ directory, and samples of valid XML files can be found in the fixtures/ directory.

Any XML file (including manifest.xml) can be signed with a public key crypto scheme. This is done to ensure that the package can incorporate content that is readable, but resistant to tampering (such as appraisal information, photographs).

Please see spec/radix_spec.rb for examples of how this is implemented.

It is expected that several people will interact with an object, through purchasing, certification, or other transactions.