ANERO is a framework for providing a web platform for collecting data and for maintaining that data in a structured form. ANERO is based on the Django web framework, which is written in the Python programming language. ANERO is therefore also written in Python.

For every project that uses ANERO, there is a separate instance that uses its own database. That means a project has its own space for its own data. But it is also possible to import data from other projects or from external sources.

ANERO Building Blocks

ANERO is built of different modules that provide various functionality. Those modules all have various settings to adapt them to different use cases. Every module has links to its data in the menu bar at the top of the ANERO interface.

The main module of ANERO is the generic module, that provides the basic interfaces for creating, reading, updating, merging, enriching, duplicating, and deleting data. It does that by providing web forms where data can be entered. Then there is a tabular listing of the data that already exists. Every entry in this list has a button for viewing the details, for updating the entry, for deleting the entry and for duplicating (or copying) the entry. It is also possible to import data from other web sources, for example from wikidata or geonames.

The page that shows the tabular listing also provides a filter. This is useful if there is a lot of data. Those types of filters that are available are automatically generated for the type of data that is listed, but they can be adapted (more on that later).

All data that is managed in ANERO uses the generic module.

Another module of ANERO is then entities module. Entities have additional features:

• They have a separate menu item in the top bar
• Every entity gets a URI as a static identifier

The next module is the relations module. Similar to entities, relations have a separate entry in the main menu. Relations define how data entries in ANERO relate to one another. Relations point to a subject and an object and link those two together.

Then there is the collections module. Collections allow grouping data together. A synonym for collections would be tags.

At last there are helper modules: the search module and the documentation module. The search module allows doing a wider search. The mentioned filter in the tabular listing of the generic module only allows filtering data of one specific type. The search module provides a search index to search over different kinds of data. The documentation provides an overview of the data that can be entered. It provides a graphic representation of the data model.

The Data Model

The first step before you can start using ANERO, is to define a data model that represents the data that you want to enter and maintain in ANERO. No worries, that data model is not set in stone and can change over time and it usually does. The data model is a first structured view on the data you are working with.

Usual types of data that are managed in ANERO instances are for example persons and places. But its also possible to manage animals or celestial objects. For every type of data, attributes of that datatype can be defined.

A person for example has a forename and a surname and a date of birth. A place has a label and coordinates.

In ANERO, both person and place are usually defined as entities. A person can also have a profession. The profession can be modelled in different ways- every profession could be a collection for example. But given that there might be a lot of different professions, usually a separate profession type is created, but it is not an entity itself. The person then gets an attribute profession that can be one of the profession types.

To store relationships between persons and places in ANERO, relations can be defined, for example born in or lived in. These relations can themselves have attributes: a person lives in a place for a period of time, so the lives in relations gets a start date and an end date.