Canonical Text Service

Resources

Public Text Inventories
(!) = in editing process

Namespace	Textinventories (capped at 10k)	Content	Source
dsb (!)	1	lower sorbian text corpus	Serbski Institute
pbc	1	20 copyright-free mutlilingual parallel bible translations	Parallel Bible Corpus
pcp	1	Chrétien de Troyes's Le Chevalier de la Charrette (Lancelot, ca. 1180)	The Princeton Charrette Project
tg	1 2 3 4 5 6 7	Textgrid	The Digital Library in Textgrid
tgap	1	Thomas Gray Archiv Poems	Thomas Gray Archive
voth	1	David Boder: Voices of the Holocaust	Voices of the Holocaust Project

Tools

Namespace Resolver provides endpoint URLs based on URN namespaces
CTS Instance Viewer provides an meta overview about available CTS instances

Source Code Resources

CTS Server (Git hosted via Bitbucket.org)
Python API WIP

Suggested Citation

Tiepmar, J. (). Canonical Text Service. https://urncts.eu

Impressum and Data Protection Policy

This is a non-commercial academic research and data webservice.

Impressum
Dr. Jochen Tiepmar, Fraunhoferstraße 7, 04178 Leipzig, Saxony, Germany.
Preferably Email: tiepilab at gmx.de or the usual academic communication channels.

Data Protection Policy
No user data is collected besides IP access logs that are stored by Apache Server software. These access logs are deleted automatically. Data sets are provided according to their public license or prior individual agreements. Tools may include publicly available software licenses (namely plotly.js and cytoscape.js).

FAQ

What is a Canonical Text Service?

The Canonical Text Services protocol defines interaction between a client and server providing identification of texts and retrieval of canonically cited passages of texts. The official specifications by David Neel Smith and Christopher Blackwell can be found here. To put it relatively simple: CTS serves text passages that are specified by URN like references. It is specified in a way that allows to create CTS URNs for any possible text passage in a document. The data can be requested using GET requests that are provided in an URL. Each request must contain one parameter request which specifies the CTS function to use. Function specific parameters - like the URN - are added as additional GET parameters.

Is the implementation feature complete?

Subpassage notation, GetPassagePlus and error messages are missing but will soon be implemented as well as a lot of additional features that extend the CTS protocol (e.g. license management on passage request level). See this dissertation for more information about what is planned.

How about data persistency and versioning? Can I reliably cite text passages via URNs or can the text content change?

CTS URNs are meant to be persistent references. However, mistakes and improvements happen and structure markup can change if documents are still edited. There is no clear solution for this problem but some kind of versioning will be implemented (e.g. numbered updates). Text corpora that are still worked on are marked with (!) in the above table. Generally CTS URNs can be considered safe for citation purposes.

How reliable is this service? Will you monetize it once people depend on it?

The server is financed privately and I am using these webservices for my own programming work and research. The software is open source and can be recreated by anyone. It is planned to implement CTS Cloning, which will allow decentralized distributed backups for texts once they got "CTSified"; this will eliminate any dependency on individual servers as it will allow anyone to mix and host their own data instances. Monetizing this service will not be neccessary and would be counter productive for me personally.