Introduction

Minifold is a program written in python3 able to query a set of heterogeneous sources of data.

• HAL, through the HAL API,
• DBLP, through the DBLP API,
• LDAP server,
• tabular-based files (i.e. CSV files, HTML files containing a table...),
• twitter
• (see the full list ...)

It also provide SQL-like operators two manipulate the resulting streams of data.

Overview

Minifold is a simplified version of Manifold, a project mainly developed by Jordan Augé, Marc-Olivier Buob and Loïc Baron at University Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC) and which implements Object Centric Networking Paradigm:

• Objects are named and made of typed attributes
• They are announced by some object providers, and queried by object consumers.
• A query plane may involve several object from various sources in order to combine them and extract some relevant information (L2). It is typically distributed over several nodes of the network, which execute a sub-part of the query plane.
• Ideally, the consumer should only express a "simple" query and let the network establish the query plane by itself by taking advantage of the semantic links connecting the objects (L3).

Minifold implements only the Layer 2. Hence, the developer has to specify an explicit query plane. Minifold can be seen as a framework inspired from SQL to manipulate heterogeneous data (XML files, CSV files, LDAP server, DBLP server, HAL server), twitter. Its design allows to integrate other kind of data sources.