alpha23linked

alpha23linked is a hypothetical, open-source platform designed to enable robust linking of data, documents, and digital objects across heterogeneous systems. It provides a protocol and runtime for creating verifiable, versioned connections between datasets, knowledge graphs, and applications. The project emphasizes reproducibility, data provenance, and cross-domain interoperability.

The concept emerged in 2023 as a collaborative effort among researchers and developers focusing on data integration and provenance. Early prototypes demonstrated cross-referencing across databases and file formats. The project adopted an open governance model with contributor guidelines and a permissive license.

At its heart is a content-addressable linking layer built on immutable identifiers, enabling references to data objects with verifiable provenance. It employs a versioned graph model, audit trails, and optional privacy controls. The platform provides a modular runtime and language-agnostic interfaces, with bindings for common languages and a REST/GraphQL API. It supports offline-first operation and edge-friendly deployment.

Users leverage alpha23linked to create linked data products, data catalogs, and reproducible research pipelines. The ecosystem includes libraries for data ingestion, transformation, and querying across distributed stores, plus tooling for provenance visualization and validation.

As an experimental project, alpha23linked has drawn interest from data science and digital library communities but limited mainstream adoption. Critiques focus on complexity, performance trade-offs, and the learning curve for governance and data modeling.

Related concepts include knowledge graphs, data provenance, content-addressable storage, decentralized identifiers, IPFS, and the W3C PROV standard.