Merge pull request #1 from danbri/master

Syncing from Dan's repository

Author: vickitardif

.gitattributes

@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@
+# Set the default behavior, in case people don't have core.autocrlf set.
+* text=auto
+
+# Explicitly declare text files you want to always be normalized and converted
+# to native line endings on checkout.
+*.c text
+*.h text
+*.rdfa text
+*.txt text
+*.py text
+
+# Declare files that will always have CRLF line endings on checkout.
+*.sln text eol=crlf
+
+# Denote all files that are truly binary and should not be modified.
+*.png binary
+*.jpg binary
+

README.md

@@ -2,3 +2,52 @@ schemaorg
 =========
 
 Schema.org on app engine
+
+This codebase is a simple Python app used to publish the schema.org site.
+
+It uses Google App Engine, and is designed to allow schema.org contributors to explore 
+new or improved schemas. The code has a bias towards simplicity and minimal dependencies,
+rather than elegance and re-usability. 
+
+The app reads its schemas and examples from the data/ directory when it starts up. These
+are expressed in simple text formats. Proposals to schema.org can be provided as diffs
+or github pull requests.
+
+Internals
+=========
+
+Internally, the app uses a simple RDF-like graph data model, and has a parser for 
+the RDFa Lite subset that we use to represent schemas. Potential contributors are 
+cautioned that this code is not designed to become a general purpose framework, and
+that we're comfortable with it being hardcoded in various ways around the needs and
+approaches of schema.org. If that's not too discouraging, do let us know if you find
+interesting uses for it or have ideas for improvements.
+
+See also wiki: https://github.com/rvguha/schemaorg/wiki/Contributing
+
+Formats and standards
+=====================
+
+All schemas and examples are in data/ in utf-8 encoded files.
+
+The main schemas file is data/schema.rdfa (utf-8)
+
+While developing schemas, using data/sdo-somethinghere-schema.rdfa can be useful.
+
+The format is based on W3C RDFS in HTML/RDFa format, see http://schema.org/docs/datamodel.html
+
+The examples are stored in data/examples.txt (utf-8) 
+
+As with schemas, data/*examples.txt will also be read. It can be useful to develop
+using separate files. When vocabulary is finally integrated into the main repository, schema
+data will be merged into schema.org. However examples will stay in separate files, as this
+works better with git's file comparison machinery.
+
+Notes
+=====
+
+This documentation concerns the software codebase rather than schema.org itself. 
+
+However do note that labels, comments, and documentation should use US English (in the code
+and schemas), if a choice between English variants is needed. Please aim for international 
+English wherever possible.