Tag: Web Services / API

TEI XML to Zenodo service published: Automatic depositing the project’s TEI files at a long-term archive

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The idea: automatic depositing the project’s TEI files at Zenodo

[Update 2023-01-25: There is a recording of an e-editiones workshop. However, the TEI2Zenodo platform mentioned in the article and in the workshop is unfortunately no longer reliably available.]

We have been using the github-zenodo integration for a while already with our source code releases. This allows us to deposit our code, update the deposit with new releases and get a persistent identifier for each of the versions. Since we are facing similar requirements for our TEI XML files, I have investigated how we could take profit of this or a similar mechanism. The crucial difference is this: The integration as it is makes deposits from releases/snapshots of the whole github repository, i.e. of all the files that are in the version control system. This is good for software, where all the files depend on each other and make sense only in the context of an encompassing application. But for our TEI sources, it would be better to have deposits for individual files (and persistent identifiers for them) rather than for the collection as a whole.

So I have developed a “TEI2Zenodo” service (in the following just “t2z”) that can take care of uploading our files to zenodo. The idea is that a project or an institution that regularly wants to commit TEI XML files to long-term archival can host an instance of it and do its uploads via this instance. I have used it to upload 16 of our source TEI files automatically from our github repository.

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(Deutsch) Entwicklung der Webanwendung (v2.0)

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Ein Bericht von David Glück und Andreas Wagner

Am 1. März 2018 wurde die Version 1.0 der Webanwendung im Rahmen eines Beitrags von Andreas Wagner und David Glück bei der Konferenz „Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum 2018“ als freie Software veröffentlicht und der wissenschaftlichen Community zur Verfügung gestellt. Seitdem wird die Webanwendung in Open Source und mit einem laufenden Versionierungs­modell weiterentwickelt. Sowohl die Webanwendung als Ganze als auch die einzelnen Releases der Anwendung sind seitdem nachhaltig archiviert und über DOIs zitierbar.1 Ebenfalls 2018 wurde die auf der Webanwendung aufbauende Digitale Quellensammlung des Projekts erstmals einem fachwissenschaftlichen Publikum präsentiert und (in Verbindung mit der Publikation von Francisco de Vitorias Confessionario, des ersten Textes der Digitalen Quellensammlung) als Forschungsplattform veröffentlicht. Im März 2020 haben wir die Version 2.0 der Webanwendung veröffentlicht. Im Folgenden wollen wir einen Überblick über die wichtigsten Entwicklungen seit der erstmaligen Veröffentlichung geben. Continue reading “(Deutsch) Entwicklung der Webanwendung (v2.0)”

(German) iiif in der Schule von Salamanca

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Das iiif Consortium und die weitere iiif Community haben Standard-Protokolle definiert, wie man sie in der Darstellung von Bildressourcen benötigt. Die Protokolle sind als Beschreibungen von “Schnittstellen” formuliert, d.h. es wird beschrieben, unter welcher Adresse, mit Hilfe welcher Parameter der Dienst eine bestimmte Funktion anbieten soll. In dieser Weise gibt es Beschreibungen von Zoom-/Rotations-/Ausschnitts-/Format-Konversions- und ähnlichen Diensten in der iiif image API, die aktuell in Version 2.1.1 vorliegt. Ferner Beschreibungen von Zugangsmanagement- und Authentifikationsservices sowie von Such-Funktionen in der Authentication API bzw. der Search API, beide jüngeren Datums und erst in der Version 1.0 vorliegend. Beschreibungen von Video- und Audio-Daten (z.B. für die in diesem Fall hinzukommenden Zeit-Indices der Ressourcen) sind in Vorbereitung.

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Code Release and Open-Source Development of the ‘School of Salamanca’ Web Application

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On 1 March 2018, we have released the code of the web application of the ‘School of Salamanca’ project’s digital edition (https://salamanca.school) as free and open source software (under the MIT license) on GitHub: https://github.com/digicademy/svsal, where the development process and the versioning of our web application takes place exclusively from this date onward. The publication of our web application’s code represents the first major code release of the project; other parts of our digital infrastructure and the research data will be published separately.

The web application, now having reached version 1.0, has been developed since 2014 and, more precisely, consists of an eXist-db application package. While this package can be downloaded and deployed in any eXist-db (version 3.6+) instance, it must be mentioned that, in order to function correctly, the web application draws upon the integration with further, external services: for example, an iiif-conformant image server (image and presentation APIs) allowing for the incorporation of facsimile images in the reading views of our works, or a SphinxSearch server providing lemmatized and cross-language search results for the texts. Notwithstanding these current caveats in portability of the application package, and although there still remains much to be achieved with regards to the functionality of our web application, the code underlying central features of the application (such as the endless-scrolling segmentation of texts in the reading view, the content negotiation-based URI-linking of texts and text segments, and others) is fully available now and can be utilized or serve as an example for similar projects, for instance. For a more extensive and detailed description of current features, caveats, and provisos of the application please refer to: https://github.com/digicademy/svsal.

The software is tagged with a DOI so that it can be cited: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1186521

What’s in a URI? Part I: The School of Salamanca, the Semantic Web and Scholarly Referencing

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Starting from experiences of the the philosophical and legal-historical project “The School of Salamanca. A digital collection of sources and a dictionary of its juridical-political language”, this article discusses an experimental approach to the Semantic Web.1 It lists both affirmative reasons and skeptical doubts related to this field in general and to its relevance for the project in particular. While for us the general question has not been settled yet, we have decided early on to discuss it in terms of a concrete implementation, and hence the article will also describe preliminary goals and their implementation along with practical and technical issues that we have had to deal with.

In the process, we have encountered a few difficult questions that — as far as we could determine — involve (arguably) systematic tensions between key technologies and traditional scholarly customs. The most important one concerns referencing and citation. In the following, I will describe a referencing scheme that we have implemented. It attempts to combine a canonical citation scheme, some technologies known primarily from semantic web contexts and a permalink system. Besides the details of our particular technical approach and the very abstract considerations about risks and benefits of the semantic web, I will point out some considerable advantages of our approach that are worthwhile pursuing independently of a full-blown semantic web offering.

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