Full Documentation at http://digital-milliet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Overview

The Digitat Milliet supports the creation and display of an interactive collection of ancient Greek and Latin texts about painting. It is a digital interpretation of “The Recueil des textes grecs et latins relatifs à la peinture ancienne” (“Collection of Greek and Latin Texts Concerning Ancient Painting”), the initiative of a French academic painter, Paul Milliet, who had a passion for ancient Greek culture.

The Digital Milliet is implmented as a Flask Application, backed by a MongoDB database, supported by external web services.

Installation Instructions

The following instructions are for setting up a Development environment for Digital Milliet.

Install Prerequisites:

• mongodb
• python 3.5, pip and virtualenv

sudo apt-get install -y python3-pip python3-dev build-essential mongo

Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/perseids-project/digital_milliet

Setup the sample data

mongorestore digital_milliet/db/sample

Create a virtual environment

cd digital_milliet
virtualenv -p /path/to/python3 venv
source venv/bin/activate
python setup.py install

Run the code, installing test fixtures and with a fixed user:

python runtest.py --install --loggedin

Or with Docker and Docker Compose

git clone https://github.com/perseids-project/digital_milliet
cd digital_milliet
docker-compose build
docker-compose up

For production deployment, see Puppet manifests in the puppet subdirectory of this repository.

Configuration

All deployment specific variables and dependencies are specified in an external configuration file. By default the application looks for a configuration file named config.cfg in the digital_milliet base directory. An alternate path can be supplied in an argument to the DigitalMilliet Flask Application:

DigitalMilliet(app, config_files=["path/to/your/config.cfg"])

The default contents of this configuration file, with explanation of each setting, is provided below:

# Name of the Mongo database
MONGO_DBNAME = 'app'

# Secret key for Flask session
SECRET_KEY = 'development is fun'

# Perseids OAUTH Setup
# OAUTH_CONSUMER_KEY and OAUTH_CONSUMER_SECRET must be supplied by Perseids Administrator for Production use
OAUTH_NAME = "digitalmilliet"
OAUTH_CONSUMER_KEY = 'dummy'
OAUTH_CONSUMER_SECRET = 'dummy'
OAUTH_REQUEST_TOKEN_PARAMS = {'scope': 'read'}
OAUTH_BASE_URL = 'https://sosol.perseids.org/sosol/api/v1/'
OAUTH_ACCESS_TOKEN_URL = 'https://sosol.perseids.org/sosol/oauth/token'
OAUTH_ACCESS_TOKEN_METHOD = "POST"
OAUTH_REQUEST_TOKEN_URL = None
OAUTH_AUTHORIZE_URL = 'https://sosol.perseids.org/sosol/oauth/authorize'
OAUTH_CALLBACK_URL = 'https://digmill.perseids.org/digmil/oauth/authorized'

# Name of the collection for author records (future proofing to enable move to a separate collection)
AUTHORS_COLLECTION = "annotation"

# Set this to the ID for the Perseids community id in which membership enables Digital Milliet editorial permissions
ENFORCE_COMMUNITY_ID = None

# Not to be used in Production: eases development without OAuth Setup
OAUTH_USER_OVERRIDE = { 'oauth_user_uri' : 'http://sampleuseruri', 'oauth_user_name': 'Sample User' }

# Perseus Catalog API - Used for Lookup of Author and Work Metadata
CATALOG_API_URL = 'http://catalog.perseus.org/cite-collections/api'
CITE_URI_PREFIX = 'http://perseids.org/collections/'
CITE_COLLECTION = 'urn:cite:perseus:digmil'

# CTS API Endpoint for Retrieval of Primary Source Texts and Translations
CTS_BROWSE_URL = 'https://cts.perseids.org'
CTS_API_URL = 'https://cts.perseids.org/api/cts/'
CTS_API_VERSION = 5

Authentication and Authorization

The Digital Milliet application itself does not provide a user model or any AAI functionality.

The Create, Update and Delete functionality of the Digital Milliet application can be protected by the OAuth2 protocol. The location of the OAuth2 endpoint and other details must be supplied in these configuration settings:

OAUTH_NAME = "digitalmilliet"
OAUTH_CONSUMER_KEY = ''
OAUTH_CONSUMER_SECRET =''
OAUTH_REQUEST_TOKEN_PARAMS = {'scope': 'read'}
OAUTH_BASE_URL = ''
OAUTH_ACCESS_TOKEN_URL = ''
OAUTH_ACCESS_TOKEN_METHOD = "POST"
OAUTH_REQUEST_TOKEN_URL = None
OAUTH_AUTHORIZE_URL = ''
OAUTH_CALLBACK_URL = '<digmill_application_host>/oauth/authorized'

The deployment at https://digmill.perseids.org uses Perseids (https://sosol.perseids.org/sosol) as its OAuth2 provider. Perseids in turn delegates to Social Identity providers for user authentication. Perseids assigns a URI identifier to authenticated users and users supply a public-facing full name that they wish to be affiliated with their Perseids account. This information (the Perseids User URI and Full Name) are added as the creator associated with annotations created in the Digital Milliet application. Once a record is created, if it’s edited by a user other than the creator, that user is added as an additional editor in the updated annotations.

Although not recommended for production use, it is possible to disable the OAuth2 protection by setting the name and URI to associate with all records via the OAUTH_USER_OVERRIDE configuration setting. This could be used in combination with a simpler authentication method such as HTTP Basic Authorization.

OAuth2 provides Authentication but not Authorization support. (By Authorization we mean restricting create/update/delete access of Digital Milliet entries to only specific authenticated users.) Implementing a full user model and role-based authorization was out of scope for development of the Digital Milliet application. A potential future goal is to use the Perseids platform to provide editorial review board functionality, removing the ability to edit annotations directly in the Digital Milliet application.

With this goal in mind, we implemented a Perseids-specific stop-gap solution to provide Authorization functionality to the Digital Milliet application. The application configuration allows for the specification of the identifier of a Perseids review community (via the ENFORCE_COMMUNITY_ID setting). If this is specified, then authenticated users must be a member of the Perseids Community with that id in order to be able to create, edit or delete entries in the Digital Milliet. If the ENFORCE_COMMUNITY_ID setting is left empty, this functionality is disabled and all authenticated users can create, edit or delete entries.

Design: Motivation, Standards, Dependencies

The aim behind the design of the application was to support the representation of each entry in the original “Recueil” as a graph of annotations.

The primary annotation of a Digital Milliet graph/record set is a Commentary targeting a stable CTS URN identifier of the primary source Greek or Latin text which was the subject of the entry in the “Receuil”. This commentary annotation gets assigned an identifier which includes the original number of the entry in the “Receui”. Throughout the code and interface, this is referred to as the “Milliet Number”.

Additional annotations in each graph include a Bibliography, French and English translations of the primary source text, tags (freeform and semantic) as well as images representing the described artwork or related material. The images can also be annotated.

Entries are indexed for browsing both by Milliet Number and Author/Work/Passage of the target primary source text passage.

The Digital Milliet application retrieves Author and Work metadata for each primary source text is from the Perseus Catalog (http://catalog.perseus.org/).

We have used a non-standard form of a CITE URN to assign identifiers to each individual annotation in the graph. This may eventually be replaced by UUIDs or other identifier system.

In order to facilitate data reuse and interoperability we represent these annotations according to the Open Annotation data model (http://www.openannotation.org/), a standard data model for serializing annotations on resources in the world wide web. (This model has now evolved into the W3C Web Annotation Model). Image annotations adhere to the IIIF standard (http://iiif.io).

The original design called for primary source texts and translations to be identified only by their CTS URN identifiers and all textual passages retrieved at runtime from CTS Repositories.

However, as many of the texts and/or translations we need to refer to are not yet available online at a published CTS API endpoint, and the stability and long term sustainability of such end points are not clear, the application design was changed to enabled textual content to be included in addition to or instead of the CTS URN identifier of a text or translation.

The Digital Milliet application depends upon components of the CapiTainS suite (https://github.com/capitains) for its interaction with CTS endpoints and validation of CTS URN syntax.

The application uses the IIIF standard for image referencing and annotations and reuses the open source Mirador Viewer (http://projectmirador.org/) to provide image display and annotation functionality.

Workflow

The primary workflow for creating a new entry in the Digital Milliet is described in the diagram below.

Individual components of an entry can also be edited or added separately after the initial data entry, via the Edit interface.

To create a new entry, you click the Add Record button to bring up the Create form:

Use the typeahead features in the ‘Search for a Primary Source Passage’ to search for an existing text in the CTS Repository

If found, you can enter the passage range you are interested in and then click ‘Retrieve’ to to retrieve the text.

If text you need is not found you can supply the text yourself in the input box.

Proceed to enter commentary text, tags and bibliography. Follow the same procedure for translations as you did for the primary source text.

If an image you want to associate with the entry is available in from an IIIF-compliant image server you can enter the publisher and URL of the IIIF manifest. This can be an image manifest, or a canvas manifest.

To edit an existing entry, you click the Edit button next to the Digital Milliet number on the Browse display. You must be logged into see this option.

Editing proceeds similarly to the process for creating a new entry.

Image annotations can be viewed, added, edited and deleted directly using the Mirador viewer.

Click on the bubble icon to view annotations on the image. Hover your mouse over the marked up areas on the image to see the annotation text.

If you are logged in you can click Edit or Delete to edit or delete the image annotation.

You use the drawing tools in the Mirador viewer to create new annotations. Select a tool and drag the mouse to highlight the region of interest on the image. When you release the mouse the annotation dialog will popup and you can enter and save your annotation text.