The IT tool was designed at the Humanities and Social Sciences Centre of the CSIC thanks to the collaboration over these years between Juan Carlos Martínez Torres, the project’s computer head, Angel Diaz del Castillo, the IT development technician, and Pilar Garcia Mouton, scientific coordinator of the project. The different stages of the project’s progress were reported to the rest of the team in periodic meetings held at the CSIC, during which many constructive suggestions to improve the project were brought up.
For the development of the project we relied on free software, which allows it to be independent from software owner licenses while being in a technological environment where very extensive, high quality software is available under GPL licenses. The tool was deployed under the Linux Ubuntu operating system, with Apache 2.2.14 web page servers, and a Tomcat 6 applications server. The PostgreSQL 8.4 dbase was used for data storage, with Postgis modules which provide geolocation functionality. We chose PHP5 + HTML + JavaScript + CSS as programming language and in order to implement the work and customer service tools. Finally, the project’s webpage was developed using the Drupal 7 CMS (content manager).
The attempt to eliminate security issues was another reason to use free software, since open code software provides transparency and allows for complete audits.
Some specific tools were created for the work team involved in the ALPI project:
- An application so that the different team members can enter information online. With this software information is loaded into the ALPI dbase.
- An information management application in the ALPI that makes it easier to review the content that is being entered.
- Adaptation of a software program that allows for navigation through the pages that make up the ALPI survey notebooks, and which shows users the original document for each locality, in digital form. This software is incorporated within the applications created for the ALPI’s team and users.
- Adjustment of a “crop images” applet in order to crop images that are found in some of the ALPI survey notebooks, and to connect these images to the answers to which they make reference.
- The tools incorporate the ‘DoulosSILR’ font, which is required in order to view the IPA phonetic texts both in the application and in the map server.
A publicly accessible tool that will allow users to query the ALPI content and then generate maps dynamically from the data provided by the atlas searches.
Free software (GPL) used for the development and modelling of online applications, data, and the project’s materials:
Notepad++, 2014. GPL Licence. http://notepad-plus-plus.org/.
Quantum GIS Development Team, 2014. Quantum GIS Geographic Information System. Open Source Geospatial Foundation Project. http://qgis.osgeo.org.
Inkscape, 2014. Inkscape is Free and Open Source Software licensed under the GPL. http://www.inkscape.org/es/.
