The basic idea of Scraps is to simplify storing, retrieving, organizing, and exchanging small pieces of information. This information could be anything from directions to a friend's house, a list of restaurants in another city, a URL to a favourite site, or instructions on how to check out GNOME code from CVS.
Scraps is intended to ease the management of small, diverse, fine-grained pieces of information that don't fit easily into address books, calendars or other software solutions. Large content, such as documents, music or video files, aren't explicity excluded from the system, but it is not designed with those needs in mind.
The design defines an XML DTD for exporting and exchanging information, and an XML-RPC API for communicating among Scraps clients and servers. Using this, client-server and peer-to-peer systems can be set up for managing and disseminating data. Eventually, it is hoped, many applications by multiple authors will communicate using this system.
At present, the XML DTD and the XML-RPC API have been designed, and a prototype server, GUI client, and web-based client have been implemented. This was the work of Dave O'Neill, for his 4th year Honours Project at Carleton Univeristy's School of Computer Science.
Further work will be forthcoming, as will a TODO list.
If you'd like to contribute, or have suggestions or comments, please contact Dave O'Neill <dmo@dmo.ca>.
Currently, this site is still being set up. Eventually, it will provide more developer information and documentation, source and binary packages, CVS access, and all the other open source project goodies you know and love.
Unfortunately, I'm rather pressed for time at the moment, so these things will be forthcoming sometime later.
What is available now, though, is the original report defining this system, and the first prototype implementation of it.