In Jim Weirich’s StoryCards code, all classes in app/models include a mixin that provide an “extract” method. This method returns values of all ActiveRecord attributes in a hash.
Classes that contain collections of other entities override this method to make hashes of hashes etc.
In the end, there is an action in a controller, that can present any object in YAML.
Thus, one can use open-uri to get a machine-parseable representation of project data and do something with it.
This sounds like a Good Thing™ for many purposes.
Wish: support this kind of functionality within ActiveRecord.