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Whiiif - Word Highlighting (in) IIIF

Whiiif is an implementation of the IIIF Search API designed to provide full-text search with granular, word-level Annotation results to enable front-end highlighting.

OCR transcriptions are ingested from word-level ALTO format and indexed in SOLR.

Please note this is a work in development and therefore is offered with no guarantees as to stability, usefulness, security etc.

Prerequisites

Whiiif is designed for Python 3, but may work under Python 2, however no testing of this has been done. To use py2, please edit Makefile

Whiiif requires a preinstalled SOLR instance (any version 8.0-8.3.1. NB: Whiiif currently relies on an older version of the solr-ocrhighlighting plugin and as such does not work with SOLR 8.4+ yet) and installation of the solr-ocrhighlighting plugin v0.3.1.

SOLR configuration files are provided in the solrconf directory and you can use these if you just want to get up and running quickly. Otherwise, please refer to the documentation for more detailed instructions.

Some Flask dependencies are compiled during installation, so gcc and Python header files need to be present. For example, on Ubuntu:

apt install build-essential python3-dev

Development environment and release process

• create virtualenv with Flask and Whiiif installed into it (latter is installed in develop mode which allows modifying source code directly without a need to re-install the app): make venv

• run development server in debug mode: make run; Flask will restart if source code is modified

• run tests: make test (see also: Testing Flask Applications)

• create source distribution: make sdist (will run tests first)

• to remove virtualenv and built distributions: make clean

• to add more python dependencies: add to install_requires in setup.py

• to modify configuration in development environment: edit file settings.cfg; this is a local configuration file and it is ignored by Git - make sure to put a proper configuration file to a production environment when deploying

Deployment

In either case, generally the idea is to build a package (make sdist), deliver it to a server (scp ...), install it (pip install whiiif.tar.gz), ensure that configuration file exists and WHIIIF_SETTINGS environment variable points to it, ensure that user has access to the working directory to create and write log files in it, and finally run a WSGI container with the application. And, most likely, it will also run behind a reverse proxy.

Acknowledgements

This project takes inspiration from Glen Robson's Simple Annotation Server and the Ocracoke project at NCSU.

A cookiecutter flask template was used for the initial application framework.

License

This project is released under the terms of the GNU LGPL v3. For more information, please see LICENSE.md