The DTS Specification is currently a First Public Working Draft.
The Distributed Text Services (DTS) Specification defines a Hypermedia-Driven Web API for working with collections of text as machine-actionable data. It specifies 3 distinct operation endpoints:
- The Collection Endpoint is used to navigate the text collection contents
- The Navigation Endpoint is used to navigate within a single text document
- The Document Endpoint is used to retrieve complete or partial texts
The Collection and Navigation endpoints return JSON adhering to the W3C Hydra standard. The Document returns TEI/XML of the requested text or fragment.
The Distributed Text Services effort has been inspired, informed and influenced by the Canonical Text Services protocol (CTS). CTS has allowed many classical, canonical texts encoded in TEI to be made available in a machine-actionable, linked open data fashion. However, the CTS API is tightly coupled to the CTS URN identifier system which does not support citation systems used by more modern content or other forms of writing, such as papyri or inscriptions. The API also does not adhere to modern community standards for Web APIs.
To address these limitations and enable standardized, machine-actionable operations across a wide variety of texts, a group of interested scholars and technologists have collaborated to develop the Distributed Text Services specification. We hope this will become a community-supported standard for achieving interoperability and shared services and tools for working with digital text collections.
The DTS API provides the following core capabilities to clients:
- Retrieve lists of collection members
- Retrieve metadata about individual collection items
- Retrieve lists of citeable passages within a text
- Retrieve lists of citeable passages within a text as groups of client-defined sizes (e.g. groups of 10 lines)
- Retrieve metadata about the citation structure of a document
- Retrieve a single text passage at any level of the citation hierarchy
- Retrieve a range of text passages with a clearly defined start and end passage
- Retrieve an entire text
The DTS API enables its implementors to support:
- any identifier scheme for collections and documents which can expressed safely as a URL parameter
- collections of collections
- text citation hierarchies of multiple levels
- text citation hierarchies which vary within a document
The DTS API imposes the following requirements on implementors:
- Implementation of the Document endpoint requires the ability to express text as TEI/XML
The following individuals have contributed to this effort:
- Bridget Almas
- Hugh Cayless
- Thibault Clérice
- Zachary Fletcher
- Vincent Jolivet
- Pietro Liuzzo
- Emmanuelle Morlock
- Jonathan Robie
- Matteo Romanello
- James Tauber
- Jeffrey C. Witt
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The Capitains (https://capitains.org) suite of tools and guidelines will fully support the DTS API. This implementation will be deployed at https://texts.alpheios.net/api/dts
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