Introduction

KonText is a fully featured corpus query interface for the Manatee open corpus search engine. It started as a fork of the Bonito 2.68 web interface and while still sharing a lot of code with the original Bonito (now bonito-open), KonText is gradually becoming more independent.

It is maintained by the Institute of the Czech National Corpus. Current version contains all the key features of the Bonito 2.98.3 (primarily a support for parallel corpora).

Features

internal changes

• rewritten as a WSGI application (Bonito-open is CGI-based)
• modular code design with dynamically loadable plug-ins providing custom functionality implementation
• fully decoupled background concordance calculation based on the Celery task queue (alternatively, the multiprocessing package can be used)
• completely rewritten client-side code (AMD modules, code separated from templates)
• improved logging, error processing and debugging support
• improved code documentation

new features

• support for spoken corpora - defined segments can be played back as audio
• support for user-defined line groups
• persistent URLs for large queries - you can send a link to someone even if the query was in megabytes
• access to previous queries
• easy access to favorite corpora (subcorpora, aligned corpora)
• interactive subcorpus selection - you can select text types and see how other attributes' available values changed
• interactive PoS tag tool - in case of positional PoS tag formats an interactive tool can be used to write tag queries
• a concordance/frequency/collocation listing can be saved in Excel format (xlsx)
• a correct (i.e. the one calculating only with selected text types) i.p.m. can be calculated on-demand for ad-hoc subcorpora

enhanced user interface

• improved user interface and design
• extended corpora information (size, structures, attributes, citation information)
• concordance results contain also the Average Reduced Frequency
• sub-corpus can be created by a custom CQL expression
• on the multilevel frequency distribution page, starting word can be specified for multi-word KWICs
• result shuffling can be pre-set

Requirements

• a WSGI-compatible server
  • recommended setup: Gunicorn + a reverse proxy (e.g. Nginx or Apache2)
  • supported setup: Apache2 with mod_wsgi
• Python 2.7 and:
  • Cheetah Template Engine
  • lxml library
  • werkzeug library (provides WSGI middleware)
  • PyICU library (optional but preferred)
  • markdown library (optional, for formatted corpora references)
  • openpyxl library (optional, for XLSX export)
• corpus search engine Manatee
  • versions from 2.83.3 to 2.137.2 are supported (the latest one is highly recommended); unless there is an incompatible change in Manatee, newer versions should work too
• a key-value storage
  • any custom implementation (Redis and SQLite backends are available by default)
• (optional) Celery task queue task queue for background concordance calculation and maintenance tasks

Build and installation

Please refer to the doc/INSTALL.md file for details.

Customization and contribution

Please refer to our Wiki.