Dillmann lexicon app

This application, built in eXist-db, uses basic techniques to display data from the digitization process of the Lexicon Linguae Aethiopicae of Augustus Dillmann. It is deployed at the moment only for registered users with the relevant data at the University of Hamburg. The application assumes a local collection DillmannData where the files are stored. Data is encoded in TEI using the Dictionary module.

this dataset has the following doi:10.25592/uhhfdm.130

Requirements

• Java with Ant (for building)
• Docker (for local development)
• Node.js (for testing)
• Bats (for testing)

Features

preprocessing

Heavy preprocessing of data has been carried out with regex in oxygen to encode the text starting from a txt version provided by Andreas Ellwardt. The data is being processed within this application to improve the structure and the reusability of the large amount of information provided by this work. all parts of speech, abbreviations, citations, translations, notes, nesting of meaning, column breaks, internal references etc. have been marked up in TEI XML and the app relies on that markup as a structure

Search

• homophones of the ethiopic language are searched as a standard if not otherwise specified.
• modes as per eXist-db sample app are also provided, with code from the demo application of eXist-db only slightly modified.

xquery

• the functions allow a group of editors to edit records with a simplified syntax in simple text, with no editor, with two XSLT transformations. The form contains also the guidelines for the editing
• before submitting the new file this is validated against the schema.
• columns are computed from the data and linked to the pdf version available here

jquery

• bibliography is pulled from Zotero EthioStudies group library
• queries to Beta Masaheft for related passages and text citations are also done with jquery. each citation in the format John 1.1 is linked in a popup to the exact passage if this is available in Beta Masaheft, otherwise it is linked to the record of the edition.

RESTXQ

• api search of text is also set for use
• list from api can be obtained
• records can be called by id

Development

To deploy the latest version of the full Dillmann application on ExistDB, use the provided docker-compose.yml file. This will set up all required services (ExistDB, Nginx, etc.) and handle the deployment process for you.

1. Make sure you have Docker and Docker Compose installed.
2. In your project directory, run:

docker-compose up -d

This will start all services in the background. You can then access the application as described in your configuration.

If you need to rebuild the containers (for example, after updating the code), run:

docker-compose up -d --build

For more details, see the docker-compose.yml file in the repository.

Testing

This project includes both smoke tests and end-to-end (E2E) tests to ensure the application works as expected.

• Smoke tests are located in the test/01-smoke.bats file and check that the containers start up and the main services are reachable.
• Cypress E2E tests are located in the test/cypress/e2e/ directory and cover user interactions and application flows. The Cypress configuration is in cypress.config.js.

To run all tests using Docker Compose, ensure that exist-db has started and finished indexing the collections. Then:

bats --tap test/*.bats

Or, to run Cypress tests (from the project root):

npx cypress run

You can also run tests as part of the CI workflow (see .github/workflows/).

For more information, see the test/ directory and the cypress.config.js file.

The code is provided without data for documentation purposes and for reuse of parts for other dictionary projects. Where possible documentation has also been provided in the code.