IDP1: Papyrological Navigator Feature Summary
November 2008.
In a major milestone for the
scholars in fields of papyrology, classics, (etc?), a new, enhanced
Papyrological Navigator research portal been completed and released
for public use.
The Papyrological Navigator
now provides integrated access to three major papyrological research
databases, namely, the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri (DDbDP),
the Heidelberger Gesamtverseichnis der griechischen Papyrusurkunden Ägyptens
(HGV), and the Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS).
The Navigator development project
was carried out jointly by Duke University and Columbia University in
collaboration with staff at Heidelberg and the Centre for Computing
in the Humanities, King’s College, London. The Navigator
software was developed at Columbia University, which also acts as interim
host for the site, and project staff at Columbia, Duke, Heidelberg and
King’s College reengineered and recoded the original, SGML-based Duke
Databank into Epidoc, and XML-based standard (etc. etc.) so that it
could be integrated into the portal.
Key features of the Papyrological
Navigator include:
- Integrated display
of authoritative cataloguing and Greek-language transcriptions for all
published documentary papyri, along with translations and high-quality
digital images for many of these. In addition, it includes unpublished
and non-documentary (literary and paraliterary) papyri from twenty-four
U.S. and Eruopean collections;
- Fully integrated
searching of composite metadata from APIS, HGV and DDbDP
- Complete full-text
searching of Greek transcriptions from the DDbDP, in both beta code
and Unicode
- Advanced text searching
techniques, including lemmatized searching, complex string, Boolean
and proximity searching, and flexible wildcarding features;
- An experimental,
scriptable query API for Duke Databank Greek text searching that will
be able to be used by other systems and applications to query that text
base;
- A large and growing
number of high-quality, multiresolution images of papyri and ostraka
from the collections of APIS partners;
- A Web-services based
“number server” that allows users and systems knowning one standard
identifier for a papyrus to look up all other relevant identifying numbers,
e.g., from different publications or source systems;
- Special branding
with the interface to identify the source of the information displayed.
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