Joyce's comment that "A man's errors are his portals of discovery" quite aptly embodies our experience in creating a proof-of-concept for the Renaissance English Knowledgebase (REKn) and the Professional Reading Environment (PReE). We propose a poster presentation that details the current status of our knowledgebase project (presented/demonstrated at last year's Chicago gathering), one that focuses particularly on [1] the direction our work is now taking, and [2] a demonstration of the technologies that we will be employing and their current implementation.
REKn consists of a large, variant, and dynamic corpus of both primary (15,000: texts, images, audio) and secondary (100,000: articles, e-books, etc.) documents. Each electronic document is stored in a database along with its associated metadata and, in the case of text-based materials, a light XML encoding. At the moment, the data is queried, analyzed and examined through a stand-alone reading client, called PReE, written for prototyping in .NET
Our current work focuses on moving both REKn and PReE into more useful developmental contexts, requiring some dramatic changes in direction from our early proof-of-concept work. For the second version of the application, PReE, our primary goal is translating it from a desktop environment to the Internet. By following a web application paradigm we will be able to take advantage of the following three benefits:
- superior flexibility in application deployment and maintenance
- ability to receive and disseminate user generated content
- multi-platform capability (OS X, Linux, Windows etc.) through a web browser
Secondly, for REKn, we will be transferring binary and textual data from the database into the filesystem. This provides us with a more manageable database and allows the use of 3rd party indexing and searching tools.
Building a proof-of-concept gave us the direction that we needed to pursue a more usable and useful reading environment for professional readers. Translating our work from the desktop to the Internet is by no means an error-free process; however, our path is much more clear now that we have made our errors and discovered a new way forward.