Token ID resolver for I.Sicily tokens (α)

This is a resolver for token IDs on token elements in the I.Sicily corpus of inscriptions from ancient Sicily.

I.Sicily token IDs

Background

I.Sicily token IDs are underlyingly of the form ISic012345-6789, where the first six digits 012345 correspond to the document ID; the four digits 6789 after the dash correspond to a number assigned to each token in the document. These are sequentially ordered through the document. However, to provide flexibility for the insertion of extra tokens in future, token IDs have a trailing 0, giving 9 extra IDs on each side for new tokens. (It is, of course, highly unlikely that all this extra space will be needed.)

For example ISic000001-0020 would in in principle represent the second token in the document ISic000001.

Compressing IDs for use in XML documents

Placing such a long ID in an EpiDoc XML document significantly reduces readability. Accordingly, it is desirable to compress the ID, without losing any information. In XML documents, therefore, the IDs are compressed to a five-digit string consisting of upper and lower case Roman characters, i.e. A-Z, a-z. For example, ISic000001-0020 is represented as AADkk.

The compression is simply the numerical part of the underlying ID, as a single string, represented in Base 52, where the characters A-Z correspond to 0-25 in decimal, the characters a-z correspond to 26-51. The procedure is:

Remove non-numeric characters: ISic000001-0020 -> 0000010020
Convert the resulting decimal number to Base 52: 0000010020 -> 10020 -> Dkk
Pad the resulting string with the '0' character 'A' to make a five digit string, as necessary: Dkk -> AADkk

Maxima

A consequence of limiting the Base 52 representation to 5 digits is that the maximum decimal number that can be represented is lower than the theoretical maximum decimal number from an ISicily token ID, i.e. ISic999999-9999 -> 9999999999.

The maximum Base 52 number is zzzzz, which corresponds to 380204031 -> ISic038020-4031.

Running and building the ID resolver

On Github Pages

Follow this link:

https://rsdc2.github.io/ISicID/

Running

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/rsdc2/ISicID.git

Open index.html in a browser

Building

The ID resolver is written in PureScript, a functional programming language similar to Haskell.

NB To build, you will need a recent version of Node.js. It has been tested on Node 20.9.0 LTS.

To build and run locally:

git clone https://github.com/rsdc2/ISicID.git
cd ISicID
npm install
npx spago bundle-app

Dependencies

For dependency licenses, see the LICENSES directory.

Acknowledgements

The software for the Token ID resolver was written by Robert Crellin as part of the Crossreads project at the Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford, and is licensed under the BSD 3-clause license. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 885040, “Crossreads”).

I found the following links helpful on conversion between bases:

https://iq.opengenus.org/convert-decimal-to-hexadecimal/, last accessed 24th July 2023
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positional_notation#Base_conversion, last accessed 24th July 2023

rsdc2 / ISicID