General purpose information repository. The idea is to store all kinds of information using a dynamic, extensible data structure.

All information comes organized in categories. e.g. news, food, sports results. This repository attempts to track all types of information in a consistent manner. The following json gives an illustration of a "record":

{
  "id": "a-unique-id",
  .
  .
  .
  .
  "protocol": "" // this is an encoded value which identifies the category of the data, among other things
}

Let us take an example to explain the concept. My small news agency needs a quick and easy way to archive news articles written by us. I can harness listforx for this purpose. In order to do so, I can create a sample JSON for each article that looks like this:

{
  "id": "a-unique-id",
  "title": "Climate change summit begins today",
  "date": "2023-01-01 00:00:000",
  "link": "link-to-external-media.com/some-photo.jpg",
  "body": "It was a brisk cold day in Geneva...",
  .
  .
  "protocol": "[unique-identifier][date-for-order][title-is-for-search]"
}

Here, we see that for my purposes, I need the date to maintain order of articles, and, I will search my articles using title as the primary search. All this information is captured in the unique protocol field.

The protocol has the following utility:

• It groups data into categories. eg. articles by the Daily Bugle, or 5 Cedi recipes.
• It can also be a way to sort the data. eg. by date, name, or even just numbering.
• It is extensible. The protocol can adapted to fit whatever its creator sees fit.

Each protocol will have a namespace, ensuring it is uniquely identifiable. With this, not only the author but anybody can return and add more data to this category of information. e.g. http://data.com/example/namespace.

Each namespace will have data unique to it. In order to make itself readable, the protocol would have to define the fields available. The list of fields always will include the following: dateCreated, title, id, link. However, to acheive the dream of being extensible, there is room to add custom fields where needed. There is a limit to the number of custom fields of 10 at the time being.

Consider these two examples of data, a recipe and an archive. Order of steps to follow is important for a recipe whiles date is important for an archive. For this reason, a protocol can nominate one field to use as the sorter. This field is then used to organize the list depending on the context. e.g. for the recipe, we could use orderStep to make sense of the data when querying it.