Welcome to Scribe

Scribe is a framework for generating crowd sources transcriptions of image based documents. It provides a system for generating templates which combined with a magnification tool guide a user through the process of transcribing an asset (an image).

Getting Started

• We first need to install a mongodb server. This is then specified in config/mongodb.yml (see config/mongodb.hudson.yml for an example). Since databases are created lazily in MongoDB just specify the database name you want to use there.

• Site settings (config/site_settings.hudson.yml) contains the application name and other detail about the project. You should rename site_settings.hudson.yml to site_settings.yml

• To generate the templates for the project look at the lib/tasks/sample_weather_bootstrap.rake file. You need to specify each entity type you wish transcribed and its fields along with help text for the user for each.

  Run:

  bundle exec rake sample_weather_bootstrap

• Run a webserver by typing:

  bundle exec rails server

• profit!

Domain Overview

There are a number of domain entities in Scribe:

• Asset
• AssetCollection
• Transcription
• Annotation
• Template
• Field
• Entity
• ZooniverseUser

Asset

Assets are the objects which you wish to have the user transcribe. They contain a link to the image file to be shown, a desired width to be displayed at and a template_id to be applied to them. The Template that Asset belongs to defines the Fields that can be transcribed.

Assets can optionally be organised in to asset_collections. These are linear (with the order being determined by asset.order) collections of assets which the user will look through in turn.

AssetCollection

A simple grouping class that links Assets. This can be used to model a book (e.g. the logs in Old Weather).

Transcription

These belong to ZooniverseUser and Asset. A Transcription is the result of a user interacting with an Asset. It is composed of many Annotations.

Annotation

An Annotation belongs to a parent Transcription and has many Entities. The data attribute persists the content of the individual user entry (such as a name, position, date etc.)

Template

A Template has many Assets and Entities and essentially defines what types (Fields) of records are to be collected from a given image (Asset).

Field

A Field belongs to an Entity. A Field has a key which is used in the Annotation data hash. The 'kind' defines how the transcription field is rendered in the UI (currently text/select/date are supported).

Entity

Entity belongs to Template and is composed of many Fields. An Entity might be something like 'position' which would be composed of two Fields: Latitude and Longitude.

ZooniverseUser

The user producing the Transcriptions.

Classification rules

Classification rules are set up in asset.rb. The classificaiton_limit method can be altered to change the number of classifications an asset required before it is "done".

Interface

The main interface element is a JQuery UI plugin annotate.jquery.js . This plugin takes a template in json format, an asset location and display options and will generate transcriptions based on the user interaction. At the end of transcription the results will be posted back as json to the specified end point. More details can be found in (need to write more documents).

API endpoints

• /templates/:template_id returns JSON for a given template
• /assets/:asset_id returns JSON for a given asset
• /transcription/new will save valid transcriptions which are POSTed to it.