Text Service Infrastructure

Pillar 1: Decentralized Text APIs
Canonical Text Service (CTS) and Distributed Text Service (DTS) and general Text API requests.

The plain text inventory format is
URN [TAB] Title [TAB] Year [TAB] Author [TAB] Copyright restricted [TAB] lang [NL]

Public Data Instances

Namespace	State	Access Endpoint (Inventory)	Inventory Structure (Treemap)	Lang	Copyright Restricted (*)	Content	Provenance	Downloadable Resources
ancJewLit	⬤ Stable	📚	🖌	heb,arc	Free	Classical Jewish sources	📚	DB+SRC Deprecated
cjhnt	Evaluation Pending...	📚	🖌	Multi	Free	Judaeo-Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti digital	📚
cousbi	⬤ Stable	📚	🖌	eng	Free	The Corpus of US Bills	📚
dhd	⬤ Stable	📚	🖌	deu	Free	Abstracts of DHD conference published by Verband Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum e.V.	📚	DB+SRC Deprecated
dracor	Coverage: 98.184% ⬤ WIP	📚	🖌	Multi	Free	(mostly) European drama from Greco-Roman antiquity to the 20th century (Open Infrastructure for Drama Analysis )	📚
dsb	WIP		🖌	dsb(,deu,hsb)	Mixed	Lower Sorbian text corpus	Serbski Institute Operator / Admin
dta	Coverage: 93.157% ⬤ WIP	📚	🖌	deu	Free	Deutsches Textarchiv Kernkorpus	📚
edh	Coverage: 99.818% ⬤ WIP	📚	🖌	Multi	Free	The Epigraphic Database Heidelberg contains the texts of Latin and bilingual (i.e. Latin-Greek) inscriptions of the Roman Empire	📚	DB+SRC Deprecated
folgershakespeare	⬤ Stable	📚	🖌	eng	Free	All Shakespeare's works	📚	DB+SRC Deprecated
gps4	⬤ Stable	📚	🖌	deu	Free	German Political Speeches corpus compiled by Adrien Barbaresi (6'685 documents)	📚	DB+SRC Deprecated
gwtc	Evaluation Pending...	📚	🖌	eng	Fully	The Game Walkthrough Corpus reduced to 8'616 Neoseeker walkthroughs.	📚
humboldtdigital	Coverage: 98.218% ⬤ WIP	📚	🖌	deu	Free	Tagebücher, Briefe, Dokumente, Forschungsbeiträge, Chronologieeinträge der Edition Humboldt Digital (Version 11.0.1)	📚	DB+SRC Deprecated
jeanpaulbriefe	Coverage: 99.760% ⬤ WIP	📚	🖌	deu	Free	Daten der digitalen Briefedition "Jean Paul – Sämtliche Briefe digital" (https://www.jeanpaul-edition.de)	📚	DB+SRC Deprecated
kant	Coverage: 95.264% ⬤ WIP	📚	🖌	deu,lat,fra	Free	Kant’s gesammelte Schriften. Neuedition der Abteilung I (https://kant-digital.bbaw.de/)	📚	DB+SRC Deprecated
lebenswelten	Coverage: 99.227% ⬤ WIP	📚	🖌	deu	Free	Lebenswelten, Erfahrungsräume, politische Horizonte (Familie Lehndorff 18.-20. Jhdt) and Neuzeitlich-bäuerlicher Lebenswelten (ostpreußische Gutsarchive)	📚	DB+SRC Deprecated
openarabicpe	Coverage: 95.293% ⬤ Stable but Incomplete	📚	🖌	ara	Free	Open Arabic Periodical Editions (Muqtabas, Manar, Ustadh, Haqaiq, Lughat, Zuhur)	📚	DB+SRC Deprecated
pbc	Coverage: 98.928% ⬤ WIP	📚	🖌	Multi	Free	20 copyright-free parallel bible translations	📚	DB+SRC Deprecated
pcp	⬤ Stable	📚	🖌	fra	Free	Chrétien de Troyes's Le Chevalier de la Charrette (Lancelot, ca. 1180)	📚	DB+SRC Deprecated
svsal	⬤ Stable	📚	🖌		Free	School of Salamanca	📚
textgrid	⬤ Stable	📚	🖌	deu	Free	Textgrid	📚	DB+SRC Deprecated
tgap	⬤ Stable	📚	🖌	eng,cat	Free	Thomas Gray Archiv Poems	📚	DB+SRC Deprecated
voth	⬤ Stable	📚	🖌	Multi	Free	David Boder: Voices of the Holocaust	📚	DB+SRC Deprecated

(*) The current list of requests that are available for copyright restricted texts is documented here.

Online Tools

Namespace Resolver - Resolve URN namespaces to API endpoints
oTAPIlot - Explore and query registered API endpoints
Openleaf - Read texts in ebook style

Resources and Source Code

Source Code Repositories (Git hosted via Bitbucket.org)

Suggested Citation

Jochen Tiepmar. 2025. Text Service Infrastructure. URL https://urncts.eu, requested on

Programming Interfaces & Export Files

Usage Examples are available via the left column

Python	Programming Library
Javascript	Programming Library
Verticalized Text Corpus Workbench Sketch-Engine (WIP)	File Generation Script Example File
Word Embeddings Word2Vec Word Vectors Language Models (WIP)	File Generation Script Example File
Canonical Text Service	CTS Specifications
Distributed Text Service (WIP)	DTS Specifications
Text Search (WIP)	Exakte Suche

Selected Collections in E-Book Style

Autor	Hans Christian Andersen \| Wilhelm Busch \| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe \| Grimm's Fairy Tales \| Franz Kafka \| Karl May \| Friedrich Schiller \| Shakespeare

Pillar 2: Text Mining

Text Mining Instances

Text Mining Corpora	Source Document List	Time Series	Lemma-Aware	Type
ancJewLit	Full	No	No	default
cjhnt	Full	No	Yes	custom
dhd	Full	Yes	No	default
dsb Virtual Hardware @SI	Copyright-Free	Yes	Yes	custom
dsb Dedicated Hardware @urncts.eu Data Source @SI	Copyright-Free	Yes	Yes	custom
dta	Full	Yes	No	default
edh	Full	No	No	default
engdracor	engdracor	Yes	Yes	default
folgershakespeare	Full	No	No	default
gps4	Full	Yes	No	default
jeanpaulbriefe	Full	Yes	No	default
humboldtdigital Chronology Letter	Full Chronology Letter	Yes	No	default
gwtc	Full	No	No	default
kant	Full	No	No	default
lebenswelten	Full	Yes	No	default
openarabicpe	Full	No	No	default
pbc French English German	Full .fra. .eng. .deu.	Yes	No	default
pcp	Full	No	No	default
svsal Latin Spanish	Full .fra. .eng.	Yes	No	default
textgrid	Full	No	No	default
tgap	Full	No	No	default
voth English German	Full .eng. .deu.	No	No	default

Default instances use the generic Text Miner. Custom instances may provide corpus specific features. See the source repository for installation and configuration. Subcorpus setups require a file named "urnlist.txt" as provided in the table.

Source Code Resources

Source Code and Installation (Git hosted via Bitbucket.org)

Cooperation

Need a custom text infrastructure? I provide CTS/DTS, text mining, corpus tools, CTS-aware Search, APIs and data hosting. I also compile specific data sets on request. Contact me for a service contract.

Internships & Qualification

The Text Service Infrastructure offers Digital Humanities interships for academic purposes. Tasks are available here but can also be offered freely.
Please make sure that the internship is valid for your curriculum with your supervisor. Contact me with a task description and information about the academic context to get started.

If you are looking for more sophisticated tasks that may qualify for a Bachlor or Master Thesis, you may find inspiration in the Roadmap.

State of Infrastructure

Chronicle

Availability and Software-Versions (versionsoftware.php): 🖌 📚
Database Versions (versiondata.php): 🖌 📚

Central Enquiry

Authors	Languages	Years	Copyright Restricted	Lemmatization Available
List Interactive List Chart	List Interactive List Chart	List Interactive List Chart	List Interactive List Chart	List Interactive List

FAQ

What is this?

tl;dr: This is a decentralized text data service based on Canonical Text Service, Distributed Text Service and additional text APIs.

Is there an API documentation? What requests are available?

Yes. There is a help command that lists functions and parameters for the tm, plain, files and eval modules and specifications for the cts and dts modules.

Is the implementation feature complete?

CTS: Stable. DTS: Work in Progress. See the Roadmap for planned features.

How do data requests work for texts that are copyright restricted?

Can I host my data on my own server ?

Yes. Data sets are available with database and source via Zenodo and can be deployed on your own server.

Are CTS URNs persistently citable?

CTS URNs are designed for persistent citation. Work-in-progress corpora are explicitly marked. Versioning can be done via edition URNs or the namespace.

How reliable is this service?

The software and copyright-free data sets are openly available and can be independently deployed. A future cloning mechanism will further reduce the dependence on individual servers.

Why do the Text Miners not use Prepared Statements?

Because the server software should not have write-privileges on the (exposed) SQLite databases. One of the most important goals of the text miners is to design the implementation as trivial as possible in order to make researchers from humanistic backgrounds less dependent on IT personell.
You can check your setup using the text miner's securitytest.php function that tries to drop the table for word references in the documents.
The TSI modules use Prepared Statements.
Please correct me if I am wrong on this.

Is it finally "A Library of a Billion Words"?

Academic Mentions

Thibault Clérice, Hugh Cayless, Jonathan Robie, Ian W. Scott (2026) : Distributed Text Services 1.0: An API Standard for Publishing and Extending TEI Document Collections. ⇒

Piotr Ciążyński (2026) : Text Service Infrastructure (GitHub Fork) ⇒

Jacob Langeloh (2024) : Unleash the Apparatus? Towards a shared representation of knowledge about connections between primary sources. ⇒

Legal & Data Protection

Non-commercial academic research and data service.
Impressum and Data Protection