FastCat Catalogues: Interactive Entity-based Exploratory Analysis of Archival Documents

FastCat Catalogues is a Web application that supports researchers studying archival material, such as historians, in exploring and quantitatively analysing the data (transcripts) of their archival sources. The application makes use of JSON technology and is configurable for use over any type of archival documents whose contents have been transcribed and exported in JSON format. The supported functionalities include:

• source- or record-specific entity browsing
• source-independent entity browsing
• data filtering
• inspection of the provenance of any piece of information (important for verification or further data exploration)
• data aggregation and visualisation in charts
• data export for further (external) analysis

FastCat Catalogues has been deployed in the context of the SeaLiT project for supporting historians in exploring a large and diverse set of archival sources related to maritime history. The application is available at: https://catalogues.sealitproject.eu/

Built With

• Node.js
• Express.js
• Angular
• AG-Grid
• Chart.js

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Getting Started

To get a local copy up and running follow these steps.

Prerequisites

• NodeJs. v16.14.0
• Angular CLI v12.2.14

   npm install -g @angular/cli@12.2.14

• Java
• Tomcat

Installation

1. Clone the repo

   git clone https://github.com/Rinakakis/FastCat-Catalogues.git

2. Install NPM packages
   • Go to \api and run
   • Go to \FastCat-Catalogues and run

   npm install

Change the IP of the API

• In the angular project go to FastCat-Catalogues\src\app\services\list.service.ts and in line 14 change the varianble Ip to the Ip of the computer that th api.js will run on.

Production build for Angular Application

• Go to /FastCat-Catalogues and run

  ng build --base-href=/FastCat-Catalogues/

• This will compile an Angular app into an output directory named dist/FastCat-Catalogues

Run the API

• Go to /api and run

    npm run server

Deployment to the tomcat server

1. In the angular application go to FastCat-Catalogues/dist and copy the folder "FastCat-Catalogues"
2. Then go to your tomcat server Tomcatxx.x\webapps and paste the folder
3. After that go to Tomcat xx.x\bin and click on Tomcatxx.exe
4. Open a browser to http://localhost:8080/FastCat-Catalogues/

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Configuration

FastCat Catalogues operates over a set of JSON files, each one containing the transcribed data of a single archival document. The JSON files are organised in folders, each one containing files of the same JSON structure (representing a type of archival source).

For configuring FastCat Catalogues, we first need to define the file 'templates.json'. In this file, we need to provide for each different type of archival source: i) a category name (used for grouping the different types of sources), ii) an ID (used for creating the links to the transcripts), iii) a name (shown in the user interface), iv) a description (shown in the user inteface), and v) the name of its configuration file.

In the configuration file of each source, we define i) the entity categories (e.g., persons, ships, etc.) that appear in records of this source type and which will be available for exploration, ii) for each entity category, the JSON fields that provide entity-related information like properties of the entity or its relations to other entities, and iii) the JSON fields that define the name of a source record, needed for the UI and the creation of the links.

For configuring the 'Explore all' functionality, we first need to define the names of all the supported entity categories and their grouping (in the 'explore_all.json' configuration file). Then, we need to configure each of the entity categories, by defining the sources and the tables in each source that provide instances (in the 'explore_all_conf.json' file). All other information needed for creating the entity tables is read from the source-specific configuration files.

More details on how to prepare the configuration are available here.

Acknowledgements

This work has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 890861 (Project ReKnow).

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