The data model of an OES application specifies the types of content and metadata that exist, as well as their relationships with each other. Figure 2 shows a typical data model that, in our experience, is sufficient for the most reference works.

Central content types

• Articles (lemma in Fig. 2) form the core of every reference work. They contain text and multimedia elements (images, audio and video), as well as additional information such as titles, publication dates and DOIs. They are also linked to contributors and other content types.
• Contributors provide information about the people who contributed, such as their names, contact details and standard data. Contributors can have different roles, e.g. author, translator or other.
• Other typical content types include glossary entries to explain technical terms, bibliographic entries (literature) for sources and references, and register entries (index in Fig. 2), which facilitate targeted access to content.

All content types can be linked to each other.

Taxonomies and additional functions

• Taxonomies help to group and structure content. For example, they can be used to categorise articles (article types) as ‘reference work’ or ‘OES application’, and to tag articles with keywords for flexible tagging.
• Versioning and translations enable multilingual or continuously updated content to be maintained.

The editorial layer is the editors´ workspace. Here you can create, edit and manage content collaboratively. The main areas are:

• Editor for writing articles;
• Forms for entering structured data such as metadata, contributors or literature;
• Configuration for customising the data model and the publication environment.

Figure 3 shows the editorial layer with the editor and forms.

With the OES Demo, we provide you with a fictional online encyclopaedia for demonstation purposes. Created using the Open Encyclopedia System (OES), it gives interested parties a first-hand impression of OES´s functionalities and features.

View OES demo as a reader

You can explore the OES Demo´s online encyclopaedia via the publication environment. You can also access the editorial layer via the ‘Login Backend’ button in the header or footer, where you can explore the data model and configuration options. To obtain access, please send an email to info@open-encyclopedia-system.org. Please note that this is read-only access, i.e. you cannot add, change or delete any data or configurations.

Test the OES demo in full

To explore the OES demo framework in detail (e.g. by adding content, changing the data model, or setting configuration options), we recommend installing OES locally.

OES is a WordPress plugin. A typical OES application consists of the OES core plugin and an additional OES project plugin that implements the OES functions for the application. This means that you must download and install both the OES core plugin and the OES demo project plugin locally.

You can finde the current version of the OES core plugin on GitHub: https://github.com/open-encyclopedia-system/oes-core. Installation instructions are also available there. The OES demo plugin can be found at https://github.com/open-encyclopedia-system/oes-demo and the OES block theme can be found at https://github.com/open-encyclopedia-system/oes-block-theme for a full-site editing block theme. Alternatively, the classic OES theme can be found at https://github.com/open-encyclopedia-system/oes-theme.