| Scholarly Digital Editions, a Leicester, U.K.-based company specializing
in complex high-end XML-based publication and development, has announced
the first commercial release of Anastasia, a new XML publication system
for CD-ROM and the Internet. Anastasia (Analytical System Tools and SGML/XML
Integration Applications) has been designed for handling large and highly
complex XML documents and document sets, in which extremely precise control
is required for their presentation. It can create output in any format,
and is optimized for HTML output directly to Web browsers.
In addition, Anastasia works on a document model that sees text not
only as hierarchically organized, but also as a stream. It's therefore
able to achieve arbitrary document chunking, starting from any point of
any document and carrying on to any other point with full understanding
of all XML encountered. This permits the creation of effects such as "keyword
in context" search hit displays or search hit highlighting in full text.
Anastasia lets users publish documents in identical form on both CD-ROM
(Macintosh and Windows) and on the Internet from identical scripts. It
includes support for all valid XML and SGML documents, and has a fully
XML-aware search engine. Anastasia can cope with documents in excess of
two gigabytes and utilizes pre-built indexes for speed. It has been used
to publish the Hengwrt Chaucer Digital Facsimile on CD-ROM (http://www.sd-editions.com).
Other publications under development with Anastasia include the Greek New
Testament, the Parliamentary Rolls of Medieval England, and the Variorum
edition of Pound's Cantos. A working Internet version can be seen at http://malle.cta.dmu.ac.uk.
According to the announcement, Anastasia's ease of use makes it suitable
for small publishers with comparatively fewer computer resources, while
its power is beneficial for large publishing enterprises. An evaluation
version (limited to documents of less than 2,000 Anastasia elements, or
about 1 megabyte) can be downloaded at http://www.sd-editions.com/anastasia.
The full publication system is available for Windows and Macintosh systems
for prices ranging from $5,000 to $10,000 (U.S.) depending on configuration.
An academic site license is available for $1,000.
Source: Scholarly Digital Editions, Leicester, U.K., 011-44-1162214160;
http://www.sd-editions.com. |
