Cadmus

Cadmus is a software created to build and edit XML-based corpora including several types of material: inscriptions, literary passages, objects, media, and their connections.

Cadmus is not meant to represent an alternative to well-established XML dialects like TEI for representing special data like epigraphical or literary texts. It's just a quick, easy and user-friendly way of entering highly structured data including epigraphical texts, literary passages, and archaeological items, using a structure extremely open to change and easy to manipulate by software. A Cadmus corpus is just a folder with some XML and media files; the data entered can be then converted into any other XML dialect or published in any desired form.

Scenario

The typical scenario for Cadmus is:

• you have to collect a huge number of short texts from Greek and Latin inscriptions, literary passages, media, etc., in a distributed scenario where a team of authors will work with their own computer without any specific requirement, not even an internet connection.
• you must include a very rich set of metadata and related non-textual data in the same corpus.
• you are starting one or more digital corpora projects of this kind, either interconnected or independent, but you still do not know which kind of data you may want to include, and how you may want to store and publish them. You thus need a system where you can start entering highly structured data as a sort of database which is kept separated from any of the several forms it will get once published, but which is fully opened to expansion in structure. All the data can be easily and automatically transformed to fit any media and publication form.
• you must stick with standards, and all the data, whatever their nature (textual, metatextual, extratextual) and inner connections, must be simply textual data. A Cadmus corpus is just a folder with some text files (and optionally media files) into it, so you are free to copy it wherever you want.
• your authors require minimal training and need to know nothing about the inner structure and working of these corpora. They just enter data in a controlled, graphical and user-friendly environment, filling a set of forms according to the data they are dealing with. Also, Greek Unicode text editing must be easy and the software must provide all the typographical resources required by highly specialized texts like inscriptions.

Cadmus is an editing software which generates and edits a set of Unicode XML files with all the associated media resources. The user just fills some fields in its user interface forms, and it takes care of all the work of encoding them into a proper XML structure, connecting data, validating them, indexing them, and exporting them into any desired format or publish them into any specific form and medium. At this time it deals with epigraphical texts, literary passages and uninscribed objects, but its architecture is open and free to grow without having you to change anything in your existing data.

Requirements

Cadmus requires a PC with MS DotNet 3.5 runtime (freely downloadable from the web if you don't already have it installed). It's 100% managed code and has no other requirement. It comes with a setup program which automatically downloads and installs the required components and places some entries in your start menu, but it leaves no trace in registry and could be simply copied to a folder and run.

Apelles

You can also try here an online version of Apelles, a companion application for Cadmus which is used to add XML-based metadata to any image, typically inscriptions or graffiti images, and to let the end user view them or take measurements with his mouse in an interactive publication.