PhiloLogic 3.1 review
DownloadPhiloLogic is the primary full-text search, retrieval and analysis tool developed by the ARTFL Project and the Digital Library Develo
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PhiloLogic is the primary full-text search, retrieval and analysis tool developed by the ARTFL Project and the Digital Library Development Center (DLDC) at the University of Chicago. PhiloLogic is a Free Software implementation of PhiloLogic for large TEI-Lite document collections.
The wide array of XML data specifications and the recent deployment of basic XML processing tools provides an important opportunity for the collaborative development of higher-level, interoperable tools for Humanities Computing applications. The sophistication and power of the TEI-XML encoding specification supports the development of extremely rich textual data representations that encourage, if not require, development of sets of tools to exploit features of encoded text to perform particular tasks.
It may be the case that one general tool will never fit all possible uses for encoded documents, but that a set of more specialized, interoperable tools for end-user applications will provide a mechanism for cost-effective deployment of end-user applications.
As the ARTFL Project's contribution to the collaborative development of these tools, PhiloLogic has been enhanced to support a wide variety of TEI-Lite (XML and SGML) encoded documents optionally using the Unicode character specification. We feel that Humanities Computing applications are particularly well suited to open source development by a community with wide ranging technical abilities that is not well supported by the commercial sector. Our goal is to provide as many features as possible while not requiring significant administrative or development work to use effectively.
Originally implemented to support large databases of French literature, PhiloLogic has been extended to support a wide variety of textual and hypermedia databases in collaboration with numerous academic institutions and, more recently, commercial organizations.
PhiloLogic is a modular system, in which a textbase is treated as a set of coordinated or related databases, typically including an object (units of text such as a letter, scene, document, etc) database, a word forms database, a word concordance index mapped to textual objects, and an object manager mapping text objects to byte offsets in data files. Each of these databases is stored and managed using its own subsystem.
Here are some key features of "PhiloLogic":
light, fast, robust, extensively used and tested
few dependencies, basic installation almost wholly self-contained
out of the box operation with many configuration options
TEI-Lite XML/SGML with Unicode support
MySQL back-end for bibliographic searching
optional XML-aware or non-XML bibliographic loaders
interoperability across certain systems
fault tolerant
open source
What's New in This Release:
CGIs have been modified to support multilingual user interfaces.
300 system messages have been translated into French and modularized into language-specific arrays.
Word padding in KWIC reports has been fixed.
PhiloLogic 3.1 keywords