Sam’s Greenstone Blog 27/6/2011

admin. Monday, June 27th, 2011.

Last week I spent a fair amount of time helping out other people in Greenstone lab. One of our recent additions is a Masters student from India named Papitha. Her project involves using Greenstone 3 to create a framework for scholars to work with large sets of images and OCRed text and to organise these into cohesive collections. Some examples of potential functionality include dynamically creating new documents and merging and/or splitting existing documents. So I have been showing her the ins and outs of Greenstone 3, as well as helping to set up a platform for her to start working from.

There is also another Sam in the lab who had been working for us alongside working on his PHD, he took some time off to finish his PHD and now that his PHD is finished he is working for us part time again. He has been working on a way to more easily customise the format of Greenstone 3. As I’ve mentioned before, with Greenstone 3 we use XSL stylesheets to control the formatting of the various pages, instead of the format statements and macros that Greenstone 2 used. XSL stylesheets are good in that they give us a large amount of flexibility, but this can also make them difficult to understand (especially for people who don’t have any experience in XML) so Sam has been working on a way to hide a lot of the underlying complexity by presenting a simple interface on the pages themselves. I have been helping him with some of the XSL coding as well as some of the run-time code.

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