CELLAR

Computing Environment for Linguistic, Literary, and Anthropological Research

CELLAR is an object-oriented database system that is being developed by the Academic Computing Department of SIL to meet the data management needs of our field workers. Two of its special features are the ability to cope simultaneously with data in many languages, and design which separates the conceptual model of a data set from multiple (interchangeable) views for display and encoding formats for import and export. While important aspects of the design were motivated by the needs of linguistic research, the system is fully programmable and can be used to develop text-related (as opposed to number crunching) applications for any discipline. The following resources describe the system more fully:

• Technical Overview of CELLAR, written in 1988, was part of the original project proposal.
• The Nature of Linguistic Data and the Requirements for a Computing Environment for Linguistic Research, originally written in 1993 for a linguistic audience, describes the rationale behind the development of the system.
• The article "Extended Objects" by Rettig, Simons, and Thomson describes significant extensions CELLAR has made to the object-oriented paradigm. It was published in the August 1993 issue of Communications of the ACM.
• Conceptual Modeling vs. Visual Modeling, a paper presented at the joint international conference of the ALLC and ACH (Paris, April 1994), demonstrates with examples from corpus linguistics and textual criticism how CELLAR can associate multiple visual models with a single conceptual model.
• Multilingual Data Processing in the CELLAR Environment, a paper presented at Linguistic Databases (Groningen, March 1995), lists six facets of multilingual computing and describes how CELLAR supports each.
  (Click here for a PDF (Adobe Acrobat) version of this paper.)
• "Implementing the TEI’s feature-structure markup by direct mapping to the objects and attributes of an object-oriented database system" describes an application of CELLAR. Implementing the TEI’s feature-structure markup by direct mapping to the objects and attributes of an object-oriented database system. Research in Humanities Computing 5: Presented at the 1995 ACH/ALLC Conference (University of California, Santa Barbara) and published in Research in Humanities Computing 5, pages 220-242. Oxford University Press.
• Importing SGML data into CELLAR by means of architectural forms is work that was presented at the 10th anniversary TEI user's conference (Brown University, Providence, RI, Nov 1997) and at SGML/XML '97 (Washington, DC, Dec 1997).

CELLAR has been under development since 1990. Verson 1.0 was publicly released in September 1996 as part of the product called LinguaLinks. The LinguaLinks Workshops use CELLAR to implement applications for phonological analysis, interlinear text analysis, lexical database management, and other tasks typically performed by field linguists. Although these are packaged as end-user applications in the product, the entire CELLAR programming environment is actually there behind the scenes. Users with a full license to the product have access to the programmiing enviornment. CELLAR is targeted for Windows PCs (with at least 24M memory and a high performance Pentium CPU).

Document date: 6-Jan-1999