Introduction - eXist: A NoSQL Database and Application Development Platform - page 11

system; re-writing the connector without eXist's XQuery turned out to be just too
complicated!
—David Voňka,
Programmer,
Semanta,
Czech Republic
The Centre for Document Studies and Scholarly Editing of the Royal Academy of
Dutch Language and Literature (Ghent, Belgium) develops rich scholarly collections of
textual data, and publishes them as digital text editions and language corpora. From
the start, we have fully embraced open standards and publication technologies. At first,
we started out with the Cocoon XML publication framework, which back then nicely
integrated with eXist (or the other way round) for efficient querying of XML content.
Since the introduction of eXist's MVC framework, we have extended our use of eXist
as a full application server, not only for querying the indexed data, but also driving the
entire application and presentation logic.
The texts we're querying (or rather, processing) with eXist are mostly document-
centered XML documents that are conformant to the schemas developed by the Text
Encoding Initiative (TEI). Depending on the specific edition project, they are enriched
with metadata such as named entities, editorial annotations, and sometimes highly
specific textual documentation (such as critical apparatuses documenting variation
among text versions). Though our texts are mostly in Dutch, we try to connect and
contribute to methodological good practice emerging in the interesting field that is
Digital Humanities. Some of our exemplar projects include a collection of letters in
relation to the Belgian literary journal Van Nu en Straks ; a digital edition comparing
20 versions of De trein der traagheid , a novel by the Belgian novelist Johan Daisne ; and
a digital edition of the first Dutch dialect survey in the Flemish region by Pieter Wil‐
lems (developed between 1885-1890).
—Ron Van den Branden,
Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document
Studies of the Royal Academy of Dutch Lan‐
guage and Literature,
Ghent, Belgium
At the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context,” we use eXist-db to
store our collections of MODS (bibliographical) and VRA (image metadata) records.
We have developed two open source applications for this, Tamboti and Ziziphus,
where our records can be searched and edited. Both applications are built entirely in
XML technologies (XQuery and XForms) using eXist-db and make use of LDAP inte‐
gration and detailed user rights management.
—Heidelberg Research Architecture,
Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a
Global Context,”
The University of Heidelberg,
Heidelberg, Germany
Haptix Games is a video game and interactive application development and publishing
studio, and we have been a Microsoft shop for as long as I can remember. We have