Distributed Text Services (DTS)

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The DTS Specification is currently a First Public Working Draft.

What is DTS?

The Distributed Text Services (DTS) Specification defines an API for working with collections of text as machine-actionable data.

Publishers of digital text collections can use the DTS API to help them make their textual data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR).

DTS enables machine-consumption of digital text collections, and can be used by consumers of these collections in a variety of ways, such as for data analysis and the development of user-interfaces, tools and services.

DTS is a specification for an API and not in and of itself an implementation of that API. Reference Implementations are available (see below) and individual text publishers are encouraged to implement this API in their own projects where appropriate.

See the FAQ for more information and a list of frequently asked questions about DTS.

Supported Operations

DTS specifies 3 distinct operation endpoints:

Navigation across texts is supported by the Collection Endpoint
Navigation within a text is supported by the Navigation Endpoint
Retrieval of complete or partial texts is supported by the Document Endpoint

The Collection and Navigation endpoin. The Document endpoint is specified to return TEI/XML of the requested text or fragment.

Capabilities

The DTS API provides the following core capabilities to clients:

Retrieve lists of collection members
Retrieve metadata about individual collection items
Retrieve lists of citeable passages within a text
Retrieve lists of citeable passages within a text as groups of client-defined sizes (e.g. groups of 10 lines)
Retrieve metadata about the citation structure of a document
Retrieve a single text passage at any level of the citation hierarchy
Retrieve a range of text passages with a clearly defined start and end passage
Retrieve an entire text

Reference Implementations

The following open source libraries implement the DTS API (1.0 Draft):

TEI Publisher client
- Implementation of the DTS API + a Client interface to the API
- Currently supports browsing collections and document retrieval, but not navigation.
MyCapytain + Nautlius
- MyCapytain is a Python library that implements the DTS data model and Nautlius is a Python library that implements the DTS API Endpoints backed by the MyCapytain libary. Both operate on TEI text collections that adhere to the Capitains Guidelines
Perseids DTS API
- Ruby on Rails implementation of the DTS API . Operates on TEI text collections that adhere to the Capitains Guidelines

Known Corpora Accessible via the DTS API