Version Updates 2014

2014-10-31

General

    • Added the Winter look-and-feel. Try it!
    • Fixed predefinition handling so that you can add a new predefinition and have it show up in your list of predefinitions to apply without having to start a fresh session.
    • Added an OCHRE Tutorial project, with sample Tutorial exercises available on the Wiki.
    • Added Preferences to front-end presentations.

Resources

    • Added an "overview map" to the table-of-contents on Map view.
    • Added a tool to "itemize" shapefiles, breaking up a shapefile consisting of many shapes into individual shapefiles that are linked specifically to an OCHRE item.

Textual/Lexical

    • Handled compound words and plurals better in assorted contexts.
    • Fussed with anti-aliasing settings to try to improve rendering of certain fonts.
    • Removed epigraphic items tagged as "separators" from consideration when building discourse units.

New on the Wiki/Website

2014-08-25

General

    • Added Copy/Paste features to the Links toolbar. The Copy-links button will copy the selected links in that links-list to the OCHRE clipboard where they will be available to the Links-Paste button on another item. If no links have been copied but an item has been copied (Edit, Copy item), that item will be pasted as a link.
    • Added Styled view for most items which creates on-the-fly a de-normalized version of the item in XML to which an XSLT stylesheet can be applied. This is a first step towards providing a mechanism for standard XSLT-based HTML-viewing.
    • Allowed taxonomy edits to be applied within the same session (instead of requiring the user to start a fresh session). This may require a Refresh of the Taxonomy hierarchy. Also, if an item's Properties had been edited using the taxonomy prior to its editing, that item will also need to be refreshed (to pick up a fresh copy of the edited taxonomy).
    • Created a global search-and-replace capability on text. This is restricted currently to OCHRE Data Service staff, but can be requested. This is particularly helpful to change non-Unicode characters to Unicode characters, where necessary.

Query

    • Improved the amount of information available in the default table produced by queries on dictionary forms and grammatical forms.
    • Implemented "Has as link" and "Is link" as Constraining options for the Advanced Contextual-style queries.
    • Made some performance improvements on certain complex, combined query types.

Resources

    • Added "webpage" as a valid resource option and modified the View processing to recognize it as such.
    • Added support for SVG images.
    • Added support for "outline" versions of shapefiles to be found automatically and displayed in maps. Use a suffix on the file name of the outline-shapefile (suffix should be identified on the Access/Paths tab of the Resource hierarchy containing the shapefiles) to match it with an existing shapefile. Note that the OCHRE resource that represents this pair of shapefiles is managed as a composite resource, one that is comprised of the original shapefile and its corresponding outline shapefile (e.g. L10-2001.shp and L10-2001_outline.shp).

New on the Wiki/Website:

2014-07-20

General

    • Implemented the use of OCHRE offline! This is particularly well suited for archaeological projects running OCHRE directly from the field. Download on your way out the door; sync up at the end of the day. See Running OCHRE Offline for details.
    • Changed the action of the Go to feature when viewing an item in a window. Previously the window would stay open and the item go-to'd would be shown in View mode. Now the window is closed and the item go-to'd is available in Edit mode, if appropriate.
    • Adjusted user interface windows and pop-ups to work better under a dual-screen configuration.
    • Added some User Preferences related to viewing of Texts (other preferences will be considered or added in the future).
    • Adjusted the Comprehensive View to pick up more property-related context.

Query

    • Allowed searching of Pending Content of a Text.
    • Adjusted Other Criteria "No links to" to take into account property-based relational links, not just loose links, for both Texts and Spatial units.
    • Refined searching of Dictionary items. Dictionary-based queries can now be Scoped by Lemma, by Grammatical form, or by Attested form. If properties are being queried, only properties of the items at the level being scoped will be considered.
    • Allowed searching for Discourse Units by Epigraphic links. Words that contain the given characters (alphabetic languages) or syllables (logosyllabic languages) in the correct sequence are returned as matches. Searching by epigraphic links takes precedence over all other options and does not compound with other criteria. Note: to distinguish searching based on syllables vs. alphabetically, in cases where it is ambiguous (e.g. "ul" -- is this an alphabetic word or a syllable?), use an extra "syllable separator" (e.g. "ul-") to trigger syllable-based searching over alphabetic.
    • Improved Find Links from the Linked Items pane to work better with dictionary-related entries. E.g. this can now be used to find all words linked to an attested form, grammatical form, or lemma, of a dictionary entry.

Resources

    • Fixed some problems with the OCHRE-Identify tool that lets you click on a map to view the OCHRE item description (instead of the GIS table data).
    • Adjusted the map View on the Links toolbar to include the "self" item at the bottom of the map layer list. E.g., if the Resource represents an archaeological top-plan, and its Links represent the shapefiles of all the loci shown on the top-plan, then the map view will display all of the loci shapes with the top-plan as the bottom-most layer as a backdrop.

Textual/Lexical

    • Updated the Prosopography tool to add a Predefinition-that-includes-a-relational-variable-of-type-Person to the Discourse unit (word) being processed, in order to make the Person-link. See the Prosopography Wizard for details.
    • Adapted the Lexicography tool to handle compound words, including compound names, more effectively. See the Lexicography Wizard for details.
    • Fixed some problems with highlighting words looked up in a Glossary from the Text using the glossary-lookup cursor.
    • Allowed Discourse unit items to have Periods. This lets them be tagged explicitly as pertaining to a Period that might be mentioned in the Text.

New on the Wiki/Website:

2014-04-30

General

    • Fixed the Resource panes not to jiggle frenetically when the name of the file URI was long.
    • Made various improvements to Sets (added column for Abbreviation, applied fonts more appropriately, provided useful labels for epigraphic units, improved inclusion of inherited properties).
    • Added a checkbox on the User Privileges pane to indicate whether or not the user has that project's permission to download images. If true, the "Save" option on the image toolbar will be available to that User.

Query

    • Added the "val" operator that lets you consider all occurrences of the specified value regardless of the variable being used to assign it.

Resources

    • Allowed user to create overlapping polygonal hotspots.
    • Added polyline and sketch modes as additional options for image hotspotting.
    • Added "undo" button to remove the most-recently-added segment/point when creating sketch, polygon or polyline hotspots.
    • Added some intelligence regarding placing hotspot labels so as to fall more-closely on the hotspot shape being labelled. This was particularly problematic for irregularly shaped polygonal hotspots. Previously the label was being drawn at the center of the bounding rectangle, often falling outside of the actual shape. This should be improved in many cases.
    • Added a new Mapping feature to allow users to assign coordinates to database items interactively. See Managing Point Coordinates.
    • Added the option to turn grid-lines on/off, drawn at integral-intervals across the map extent both horizontally and vertically.

Textual/Lexical

    • Tweaked the PDF output to include the text Name, Language and Type, even if the "Description" pane is turned off in the View.

2014-03-28

General

    • Improved sorting and display options of Aliases.
    • Added reciprocal hierarchical linking to enable effective cross-project integration of database items.
    • Allowed a parent to become its own child (recursively!) using Copy-Paste within a hierarchy.

Resources

    • Improved handling of various coordinate systems in the integrated Map viewer.

Textual/Lexical

    • Fixed a problem with the display of logograms.
    • Fixed problems with handling compound Demotic words.
    • Added a button to let an epigraphic unit "go to" its corresponding discourse unit.
    • Prosopography Wizard now lets a user abandon a Person with abandon.

2014-02-18

General

    • Made compatible with the new, more secure Java 7 update.
    • Fixed some problems with auto-labeling items.
    • Added item name-formatting that relates to the use of aliases. The name-format can be specified on the hierarchy Preferences for the items within the hierarchy. Items will be named according to the hierarchy's format when used for display and sorting within the context of that hierarchy.
    • Allowed special characters (use of virtual keyboard) and copy/paste features within the "Find by name" field.
    • Changed how we handle Copy/Paste. There have always been 2 distinct clipboards accessed by OCHRE: the regular system clipboard, and a special OCHRE-specific clipboard that retains OCHRE-specific formatting. The "Copy" and its keyboard equivalents copies to both clipboards so that OCHRE content can be copied either within OCHRE or to applications external to OCHRE. The default "Paste" feature and its keyboard equivalents will paste from the OCHRE-specific clipboard. Use the "Paste, system clipboard" (Ctrl-Shift-V) on the Edit menu to paste from external, non-OCHRE applications.
    • Provided the option of giving a label or heading to a Note, thereby allowing categorization of notes by type of analysis or commentary, at the user's discretion. The label is displayed in the View as a heading to the Note.*pic*

Query

    • Added constraining options for queries. This allows a query to consider only items that satisfy the specified constraint with respect to a given Set. The nature of the constraint can be: contained within the Set; has as a link a member of the Set; is a link of a member of a Set. See Querying for linked items for an example of this feature.
    • Added a "Not" condition to a search string; that is, find all items that do NOT contain the given string.

Resources

    • Added enhanced GIS tools for viewing shape files.
    • Improved handling of custom coordinate spaces.

Textual/Lexical

    • Streamlined "paragraph" formatting of legacy dictionary entries.
    • Added ability to understand some standard Demotic transliteration conventions for the purpose of importing and viewing Demotic texts.

Features you may have missed from prior years

Taxonomy