Introduction

The Underscore Protocol (_Prtcl) offers a set of tools for building interoperable content-management applications compatible with Web3 platforms and Web2 APIs.

It combines some of the concepts of The Web and Linked Data (opens new window), promoting the use of global identifiers for every data object that is handled by a web application, with the data structure of GIT, where each object evolves as a sequence of linked snapshots (commits).

Data objects from _prtcl-compatible applications are suitable to be:

• linked and nested with other objects from any application and platform, using URL-like global identifiers extended to include emerging web3 platforms.

• rendered and updated from different applications, with reusable web-components and data-type recognition.

• forked by creating new branches of the same object on different platforms and by different authors.

Client Libraries

_Prtcl client libraries can be used to create and update _Prtcl objects on one ore more platforms (remotes) from the same application. The libraries include multi-layer mutation buffering, data fetching cache, and event-based reactivity for efficiently reading and updating data.

Remotes

_Prtcl remotes are servers or connectors to Web3 networks that can store and update _Prtcl content. Similar to the original concept of a web-server and URLs, they resolve object's unique ids into their current content.

Remotes can be limited to data governance (CRUD operations) and/or may include data indexing to resolve queries.

For Web2 applications _Prtcl offers a NodeJS + DGraph headless CMS that can be deployed inhouse, or consumed directly from the cloud.

For Web3 applications _Prtcl offers connectors with Ethereum, Polkadot, Holochain and OrbitDB networks. These services can be paired with our web-server CMS to offer, indexing, discovery and performant data fetching.

Modules and UI Components

_Prtcl is building Intercreativity, a web-application that is similar to applications like Notion or Roam Research, but that is _prtcl-compatible.

Intercreativity is extensible and modules and UI components from Intercreativity, such as it's block-based text editor, are built to be reusable on other content-management applications.

Ok! What's next then?

Data Structures: An overview of _Prtcl primitives used to handle linked objects from multiple platforms.