Introduction - eXist: A NoSQL Database and Application Development Platform - page 10

• Who the people using it are
• What it is being used for
From the support channels available to eXist users, and as a member of the commu‐
nity, you can see that eXist is used by many people for many different purposes, but
their end goals and projects are not always disclosed or clear.
Here we have pulled together a few descriptions of various projects using eXist from
the developers of those projects themselves:
The Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center (TBRC) holds the world's single largest collec‐
tion of Tibetan texts—nearly 10 million scanned pages and over 11,000 Unicode Tibe‐
tan texts. TBRC.org provides online access to over 4,000 users via an Ajax client
written in Google Web Toolkit as a front-end to the eXist-db. TBRC has used eXist-db
since 2004 to store the catalog for the texts in the library as well as a knowledge-base of
persons and places that provide a cultural context for Tibetan literature. The integra‐
tion of eXist-db with the Lucene full-text indexing has created a powerful framework
with which TBRC.org is able to provide searchable access to the library via compre‐
hensive tables of contents in Tibetan and a large collection of texts that have been
input in Unicode in centers around the world. Our production system currently runs
eXist-db 2.1.
—Chris Tomlinson,
Senior Technical Staff Member,
Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center,
Cambridge, Massachusetts
ScoutDragon initially started as a baseball research project by a group of baseball
enthusiasts including writers, agents, scouts, fans, fantasy owners, and even former
players. This group realized a need for original English content, data, and research on
baseball players in Asia.
All data for multiple sports covering multiple sporting leagues is stored in XML docu‐
ments within eXist in a schema derived from IPTC's SportsML, most extensions hav‐
ing to do with providing multi-lingual support of players so that information may be
displayed in English, Japanese, Korean, and/or Chinese. XQuery has proven to be a
fantastic language for not just transforming the vast quantities of data to web pages,
but also for data analysis and the generation of sabermetrics-based statistics.
—Michael Westbay,
Lead Programmer/System Administrator,
ScoutDragon.com,
Japan
Semanta's core business is metadata in business intelligence. Part of our concern is
parsing metadata from reporting platforms. Many of these reporting platforms supply
their metadata in large XML chunks, which we then need to further process efficiently.
A typical example is our IBM Cognos connector, where we use eXist heavily to extract
details of report structures and data sources. Originally we thought we would only use
eXist for prototyping, but ultimately, we have used embedded eXist in the production