CELLAR
Computing Environment for Linguistic, Literary, and Anthropological
Research
CELLAR is an object-oriented database system that is being developed by the
Academic Computing Department of SIL to meet the data management needs of our
field workers. Two of its special features are the ability to cope
simultaneously with data in many languages, and design which separates the
conceptual model of a data set from multiple (interchangeable) views for
display and encoding formats for import and export. While important aspects of
the design were motivated by the needs of linguistic research, the system is
fully programmable and can be used to develop text-related (as opposed to
number crunching) applications for any discipline. The following resources
describe the system more fully:
- Technical Overview of CELLAR, written in
1988, was part of the original project proposal.
- The Nature of Linguistic
Data and the Requirements for a Computing Environment for Linguistic
Research, originally written in 1993 for a linguistic audience, describes
the rationale behind the development of the system.
- The article "Extended Objects" by Rettig, Simons, and Thomson
describes significant extensions CELLAR has made to the object-oriented
paradigm. It was published in the August 1993 issue of Communications of the
ACM.
- Conceptual Modeling vs. Visual Modeling, a
paper presented at the joint international conference of the ALLC and ACH
(Paris, April 1994), demonstrates with examples from corpus linguistics and
textual criticism how CELLAR can associate multiple visual models with a single
conceptual model.
- Multilingual Data Processing in the CELLAR
Environment, a paper presented at Linguistic Databases (Groningen, March
1995), lists six facets of multilingual computing and describes how CELLAR
supports each.
(Click here for a PDF (Adobe Acrobat) version
of this paper.)
- "Implementing the TEI’s feature-structure markup by direct
mapping to the objects and attributes of an object-oriented database
system" describes an application of CELLAR. Implementing the TEI’s
feature-structure markup by direct mapping to the objects and attributes of an
object-oriented database system. Research in Humanities Computing 5: Presented
at the 1995 ACH/ALLC Conference (University of California, Santa Barbara) and
published in Research in Humanities Computing 5, pages 220-242. Oxford
University Press.
- Importing SGML data into CELLAR by means of
architectural forms is work that was presented at the 10th anniversary TEI
user's conference (Brown University, Providence, RI, Nov 1997) and at SGML/XML
'97 (Washington, DC, Dec 1997).
- More on CELLAR via
Gopher
CELLAR has been under development since 1990. Verson 1.0 was publicly
released in September 1996 as part of the product called LinguaLinks. The LinguaLinks Workshops use CELLAR
to implement applications for phonological analysis, interlinear text analysis,
lexical database management, and other tasks typically performed by field
linguists. Although these are packaged as end-user applications in the product,
the entire CELLAR programming environment is actually there behind the scenes.
Users with a full license to the product have access to the programmiing
enviornment. CELLAR is targeted for Windows PCs (with at least 24M memory and a
high performance Pentium CPU).
Last modified: 6-Jan-1999
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