Publications are sets of content items. Basically, a Publication can be a whole static web site (with .HTML pages and .JPG pictures), or a set of XML files, to be processed later by Spirit.

The content items are named Fragments. They can be anything, since fragments are binary content.

Publications are Topic-related. For a Topic named "toothbrush", there can be several Publications, each one corresponding to a particular version of the "toothbrush" Topic.

In order to ease content access, Topics describe a hierarchical order. For example, the Topic "toothbrush" may have "teeth cleaning" for Parent Topic.

An essential thing to keep in mind is that, once a Publication is flagged "frozen", its content cannot be changed anymore. The only way to make a change is to create a new Publication in the same Topic.

Here is an example of Publication instantiation. It illustrates the use of the Family tag, which indicates that the Fragment is of a particular kind. In the example below, the Family tag is used to describe that a Fragment is a Questionnaire.

One can guess that Spirit application has a special handling for Questionnaires (with user interaction, answer storage, and so on).