About ODSAS

ODSAS is a platform for storing, personalized manipulation and individual and collective multilayer annotation of digital resources in the social sciences and humanities.

Components

The first component is constituted by the technology, software and webserving, which is called ODSAS itself. The second component is constituted by the program of digitizing and organizing the collections and archival sources. This component, called ADAP (Archives Digitales Asie-Pacifique).

Storing

ODSAS is first of all a place for storage and provision of digital resources that are of difficult access to the scientific community. Storage takes three forms. 1) The original files : digitised in high resolution (or sufficiently high to provide ease manipulation), these files are provided as such to the scientific community. 2) Annotations : all type of data that is added to the original documents (see the section on annotations below) are stored in a relational database. 3) The entire dataset is additionally stored in XML structured files for interoperability issues.

Personalized manipulation

The formats, sizes and quality of the original documents are various; the needs of the researchers are diverse; the technological performances and capacities of visualization are unequal (sizes of screens, speed of internet connection etc.). ODSAS allows for basic object manipulation that may be saved for individual objects or entire sets: rotation, negative, luminosity, zoom etc. The particularity of ODSAS is that these manipulations can be saved by every user for an object or an entire set of objects without modifying the original files. A user with slow connection, for example, could decide to vision an entire set at a reduced size to fasten download speed.

Multilevel annotations

An annotation is all type of logical, relational or textual information that is added to an object. Every object is accompanied by a first level annotation containing basic metadata describing and locating it. Users are able to add their own annotations and transcriptions to an object, and are able to set these annotations as being private or public. Every annotation may itself receive new annotations (responses, corrections, discussions etc.). Hence, every annotation of higher level becomes automatically metadata for an annotations of lower level; and every lower level annotation becomes an original document for the higher level annotation.