Notes on the Concordance of "The Writings
of Nichiren Daishonin."
A work in progress
Introduction:
Here you will find a concordance (or unabridged word index) of
the "Writings of Nichiren Daishonin." For a given word
of interest, it provides references for all occurrences of that
word.
As an example, searching for the term "Saha" yields
53 references to to the original text, along with the sentence
containing the term. These references appear after the sentences,
and refer the searcher directly to the exact location of the sentence
in the book or CD-ROM forms. In the example above, the term "saha"
yields at least one reference like this:
[WND006, Page 41, col 1, line 6, sentence 3 in para 3]
which indicates that the sentence shown may be found in the sixth
Gosho, beginning on line six of the the first column (col) of
page 41, also found as the third sentence of the third paragraph
(para).
In listing these references, the intention is to complement and
augment the CD-ROM and book forms in order to enhance their functionality.
We view these forms as indispensable, and emphasize that this
concordance tool is to be used in conjunction with these previous
forms. Copying these pages for redistribution without prior written
consent is explicitly prohibited.
Known Issues:
As in all tools, there are some limitations:
1. Words having a length of less than three are unavailable in
the index. Doing so eliminates words that are useless in a search
(take "the" as an example).
2. Lines are occasionally not highlighted correctly
in page views due to footnotes.
3. There is a limit of 10 terms per search. Since each term consumes
system resources, we are unable to accommodate larger limits and
still provide access to everyone.
Most Requested Features:
In the coming weeks, we will be adding features requested by visitors
here. If you have a request that you think would help make this
tool more useful, please let us know at the e-mail below:
[email protected]
Technical Background:
Using PDF files originating from the CD-ROM and exported into
XML, a single datasource was created for the terms and text lines.
This XML file was then parsed into a database-friendly format
and loaded into a SQL-complient database using a custom-designed
schema.
CGI code was then developed to interface with this database, allowing
web queries to be satisfied, and references to be generated for
searches.
|
