Home About MLCD Staff Publications Research

Markup Languages for Complex Documents (MLCD)

Mots 15

Mots 15 ("Mostly off-the-shelf software in 15 minutes") is an experiment in providing full-text retrieval system using mostly off the shelf software. Using clearly defined interfaces and working on top of standard systems, we are building interactive concordance and other full-text search tools from simple customizable components.

A first version of the system was implemented in February 2001. The current version, version 0.6, was finished in its present form in May 2003. It uses XPath 1.0 expressions as a query language. As a back end, it uses an XPath interpreter written by Paul Meurer in Common Lisp (using an off-the-shelf XML parser and an off-the-shelf parser generator). As a test bed, it uses a random selection of documents tagged in TEI Lite, which were downloaded from the Oxford Text Archive, to which thanks.

MOTS 15 test page

Goals for the next version of MOTS 15 include:

• a second back end using sgrep and an Xpath-to-Sgrep translator
• a more elaborate and stronger system design with clearer specification of a session manager (Mom process)
• a larger test bed of sample documents, with TexMECS documents including complex structures
• several different Web interfaces, with different levels of complexity and fussiness

Further information

• C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, MOTS 15: An interactive concordance system built from mostly off the shelf parts. October 2001. A brief general overview.
• a specification of some extension functions for XPath which we expect Mots-15 back ends to implement