[seul-edu] Project for Markup and Display of Historical Events

[Bruce Robertson <broberts@mta.ca>]

I've been encouraged to let this group know about Heml, a project providing a
Java webapp which transforms conforming XML markup into historical maps and
timelines in SVG and Jpeg. 

The project website, which is simply an instance of the latest webapp, is at
http://heml.mta.ca and provides the schema, documentation, sample documents and
a means of navigating around different views.

Example timeline, of some Russian history, in Russian:
http://heml.mta.ca/heml-cocoon/sample-timeline

Example map, of Leibniz's life:
http://heml.mta.ca/heml-cocoon/sample-map

The webapp is developed on Linux, and builds are made against the 1.3 JDK. It is
regularly tested on a Win32 laptop.

Our project's code is under the LGPL. The webapp makes use of jar files licensed
under the Apache and IBM OSS licences.

Unfortunately, the support for SVG viewing under Linux is spotty, with the Adobe
SVG viewer a beta version that will only work with Moz 0.9.1 or less. Clients
without an SVG viewer receive a static jpg image, but that doesn't compare to
the, for instance, animated historical maps that we offer in SVG. There is great
hope, however, that the next version of ASV will properly support Mozilla and Linux.

The larger goal of the Heml project is to inspire an ever-growing web of markup
that associates high-quality primary sources with the events and people of the
past to which they bear witness. Imagine the student of the future being able to
ask "What happened in 12th century Japan", getting a timeline of events in the
language of her choice and following links from it to list of pertinent
materials; imagine the students of today building the resources that could make
that happen.

Yrs,   
-- 
Bruce Robertson, 
Dept. of Classics, Mount Allison University