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The Online Linguistic Database (OLD) is software for creating web applications dedicated to multi-user, collaborative documention of natural (and usually endangered or understudied) languages. An OLD web application helps contributors to create a consistent, structured, and highly searchable web-based repository of language data. These data consist of textual representations of linguistic examples (words, morphemes, and sentences with analyses and annotations), associated and embedded media files, and exportable representations of texts (e.g., research papers, narratives, etc.)

Features

  1. Multi-user, concurrent read/write access to a server-side language database.
  2. Interlinear glossed text (IGT) representations of data with integrated feedback on lexical consistency or morphological analyses.
  3. Powerful searches over the data set.
  4. Authentication and authorization to control access to data.
  5. Export to LaTeX, CSV, and plain text.
  6. Media file support: many-to-many associations of audio, video, and/or image with content embedded in data representations.
  7. IGT text creation.
  8. Automatic orthography conversion.
  9. Inventory-based transcription input validation.

Versions

This is the OLD v. 0.2.X. It is being used in nine language-specific OLD web applications (see www.onlinelinguisticdatabase.org) and is still being maintained. However, primary development has moved to the `OLD v. 1.0<https://github.com/jrwdunham/old>`_, which includes support for creating morphological parsers, provides improved search functionality, and implements a shift to a more modular and reusable architecture (i.e., a RESTful HTTP/JSON web service with a SPA GUI). The applications running on the OLD v. 0.2.X will be migrated to the OLD v. 1.0 in the near future.

License

The OLD 0.2.X is open source and is licensed under the `GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3<https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>`_. (Note that the OLD 1.0 is also open source but is licensed under Apache 2.0.)

Technologies

The OLD is written in Python, using the Pylons web framework and an SQLAlchemy abstraction over a MySQL database.

Get & Install

When installing the OLD 0.2.X, it is recommended that you use an isolated Python environment using virtualenv. (Note that the OLD 0.2.X has been tested with Python 2.5 and 2.6, but not 2.7. Depending on your system Python version, it may be necessary to install Python 2.5 or 2.6 using pyenv or pythonbrew.) Once virtualenv is installed, issue the following commands to create the isolated environment and to make sure you are using its Python:

virtualenv env
source env/bin/activate

From Source

To download the source code of the OLD v. 0.2.X, install its dependencies, and serve it locally with the default configuration, run:

git clone https://github.com/jrwdunham/old-webapp.git
cd old-webapp
python setup.py develop
paster setup-app development.ini
paster serve --reload development.ini

From PyPI

To install a stable release of the OLD 0.2.X from the Python Package Index, use easy_install and run:

easy_install "OnlineLinguisticDatabase==0.2.9"

or use Pip and run:

pip install "OnlineLinguisticDatabase==0.2.9"

To create the config file, generate the default values, and serve the application:

mkdir my_old_webapp
cd my_old_webapp
paster make-config onlinelinguisticdatabase production.ini
paster setup-app production.ini
paster serve production.ini

Using MySQL

The default configuration file (development.ini) uses a local SQLite database named development.db, which is probably fine for exploring the system initially. However, a deployed OLD 0.2.X application should use MySQL.

First login to MySQL using your root account and create a MySQL database and a user with sufficient privileges. Something like this (replacing dbname, username, and password with sensible values):

mysql> create database dbname default character set utf8;
mysql> create user 'username'@'localhost' identified by 'password';
mysql> grant select, insert, update, delete, create, drop on dbname.* to 'username'@'localhost';
mysql> quit;

Then comment out the SQLite option in the OLD 0.2.X configuration file (i.e., development.ini or production.ini) and uncomment the two MySQL lines, changing values as appropriate:

sqlalchemy.url = mysql://username:password@localhost:3306/dbname
sqlalchemy.pool_recycle = 3600

Now the system is set up to use MySQL. Run the setup-app command again to generate the default values in the MySQL db:

paster setup-app production.ini

or:

paster setup-app development.ini

(You can ignore the data truncated warnings. This is a known issue.)

See The Pylons Book for further details on serving and configuring Pylons-based web applications.

Default Users

Running paster setup-app creates three users with the following usernames and passwords.

  • username: admin, password: admin
  • username: contributor, password: contributor
  • username: viewer, password: viewer

Use the admin account to create a new administrator-level user and delete all of the default users before deploying an OLD application.

Common Issues

Note that if you are running Debian or Ubuntu and get an error like EnvironmentError: mysql_config not found after running python setup.py develop, then you probably need to install libmysqlclient-dev:

sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev

If you get an error page when using the browser-based interface, re-saving the system settings should solve it. I.e., go to Settings > System Settings > Edit System Settings and click the "Save Changes" button.