Documentation approaches, data formats, apps

openp2pdesign · January 10, 2017, 7:50pm

Documenting projects is a very important and complex issue, especially for the Fab Lab Network!
During the years, there have been several meetings, workshops, e-mail threads, private messages, publications, software on the topic, but mostly they have been separated. This thread is for mapping and discussing all the documentation efforts so far, in order also to discuss how to improve the Project section in Fablabs.io

If you find something that’s missing, please add them below, this is just a first starting point!

FabXML

A data format called FabXML has been developed on GitHub:

It is the result of a workshop, documented here (in French):

http://fablabo.net/wiki/WorkshopDocumentation/FabmlOntologies

FabML

The FabXML format above is actually based on the previously proposed FabML format, developed by @trox, Anu Määttä and Harmen Zijp in two papers:

Fabble.cc

Hiroya Tanaka and Mozilla Japan have been working on a project documentation platform called [Fabble.cc](http://fabble.cc/), which is open source:

An example of its data format can be seen here:

gist.github.com

https://gist.github.com/oshimaryo/754fff8b01f789b8f963

fabble_project_v0.json

{
  "_id": "55a342c275627510dc240000", 
  "created_at": "2015-07-13 08:06:00 UTC,",
  "updated_at": "2015-07-13 04:46:58 UTC",
  "name": "fabblxxwalkerxx",
  "title": "project title",
  "is_private": false,
  "description": "this is project description.",
  "owner_id": "BSON:ObjectId('foobar')",/* owner id*/
  "owner_type": "User", /* "User" or "Group"*/

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openp2pdesign · January 10, 2017, 7:51pm

There might be also several implementations, I did one in Drupal years ago for a full Fab Lab website distribution, but I consider this an outdated and discontinued project:

FabLabSUPSI · January 10, 2017, 7:56pm

Build in progress has been recently shut down, but it is was designed by Tiffany Tseng, currently working at Autodesk, to document prototyping activities. Worth having a look even if it not active anymore.
http://buildinprogress.media.mit.edu/

bohne · April 29, 2018, 7:26pm

Regarding this topic, we created some solutions a few years ago: FabCenter, FabFAQ, Fabiji, and FabQR. Your can find the thesis documents on my university webpage and in the theses, links to github projects are provided. http://hci.rwth-aachen.de/bohne