Hi,

At the TEI Consortium Annual meeting in Chicago (Fall 2002)[1], I
gave a talk outlining what I proposed as an implementation model
of a TEI-aware version of PhiloLogic, the full text
system that we developed for ARTFL and have used for a wide
variety of databases over the last few years.  Following
that talk and informal conversations with a number of people
engaged in humanities computing projects, we submitted a paper
proposal for the 2004 ACH/ALLC meeting in Goteborg[2] which outlined
a development strategy and proposed an open source release of
this version of PhiloLogic.

We are in the process of preparing a distribution of this version
of PhiloLogic which will be released at the end of this month.
Our development procedure was based on building as general a set
of recognizers as possible based on samples of TEI-Lite, TEI,
MEP and CES encoded datasets in both XML and SGML.  We wound up
with almost 20 different data sets (many of which we downloaded
from public WWW sites).  As the first step in our release, we
have a number of these samples accessible from our development
site:

              http://philologic.uchicago.edu/

              http://philologic.uchicago.edu/samples.php

Some of these are currently password protected as we await final
permission from the content providers to use their documents as
part of this demonstration.[3]  I would like to thank those
projects and individuals who have agreed to let us mount their
content in the demo.

Please feel free to have a peek at the samples.  We are looking
for general feedback from users which we will feed into the
next development round.  If you have reasonably large samples
of TEI-Lite/MEP/CES documents which you would be willing to
give us access to, we would certainly like to try builds here
of document collections to see what works and what does not
work.

We are also looking for a few brave souls with a Debian Linux
machine (or other flavors of Linux) willing to test the
distribution ahead of time.  This is our first attempt to distribute
a full system, so we are certain that there will be kinks and
problems.   Also note that we are still working on user and
developer documentation.

If you are willing try out the distribution, have comments,
or document collections you would be willing to let us take
a run at, please contact us at

                [log in to unmask]

The system is designed to be a light, fast, and easy to use
package.  Ideally, we hope that once installed, users can simply
issue a single command and it will generate everything for a
WWW installation of a database, from search forms to output
configurations.  We have extensively rewritten the system as well
in order to support a significant degree of optional local
customization.

Best regards,

M

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Notes

1 http://barkov.uchicago.edu/talks/TEI2002/

2 http://barkov.uchicago.edu/proposals/ACH2004/xphilo.html

3 If you really need to look at any restricted access database, please
contact me at [log in to unmask]

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Mark Olsen
ARTFL Project
University of Chicago
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/ARTFL/

Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections
must first be overcome.     ---    Samuel Johnson