Tools for Search In Electronic Collections of Manuscript Descriptions Realized In the Integrated Environment Xeditman

Pavel I. Pavlov

Review of the National Center for Digitization, Tome 8 (2006) no. 1.

Résumé

The paper presents an extension of the specialized editor XEditMan (XML Editor for Manuscript Data) which is an XML-oriented tool for editing and browsing catalogue descriptions of mediaeval manuscripts. The original version of XEditMan offers a friendly interface for entering data on mediaeval manuscripts, visualization and execution of queries to the descriptions that are already available. The descriptions are compatible with the document type definition (DTD) structure suggested by the project MASTER (Manuscript Access through Standards for Electronic Records) and adopted by the Text Encoding Initiative. Recently XEditMan has been extended by tools for search of key words and phrases in a set of elements and attributes of all XML documents in an existing collection of manuscript descriptions prepared in accordance with the MASTER standard. The chosen set of elements and attributes includes: altName, watermarks, collation, foliation, scribe, script, medium, handDesc, origPlace, origin, acquisition, textLang, decoration, binding, condition, msContents, author, title, incipit, explicit, additions. After the search tool is started, the user is asked to type the key word or phrase representing the query. Then he/she can choose a specific subset of the elements and attributes listed above. As a result the chosen XML elements and attributes of all documents in the collection containing words or phrases equal to the one given by the user should be properly visualized.