The fine minds at SIMILE at MIT have come up with a ‘lightweight structured data publishing framework’ called Exhibit that is in the same vein as their awesome timeline widget.
It’s like Google Maps and Timeline, but for structured data normally published through database-backed web sites. Exhibit essentially removes the need for a database or a server side web application. Its Javascript-based engine makes it easy for everyone who has a little bit of knowledge of HTML and small data sets to share them with the world and let people easily interact with them.
Check out the examples, including US Presidents and Breakfast Cereal Character Guide.
They also provide a complementary tool called Babel to convert from various formats to the Exhibit JSON format.
And, as they say: “Remember: there is no database, no web application behind these examples.”
technorati tags: simile, exhibit, javascript, json, webdev