From OxGarage to TEIGarage and MEIGarage

Poster presented at the TEI Conference and Members' Meeting 2022 at Newcastle.

The OxGarage is a „a web, and RESTful, service to manage the transformation of documents between a variety of formats“ 1 . It was originally developed by Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center and Oxford University Computing Services for the EU-funded ENRICH project (Cummings et al 2009) and served the DH community for more than a decade. 2 In 2019 the OxGarage was chosen as a fundament for creating an MEIGarage, a “’workshop’ for symbolic music encoding data”. Alike the OxGarage, the MEIGarage serves the MEI community as a web and RESTful service to facilitate transformations and interoperability of their specific file formats, e.g. MEI, MusicXML, and Lilypond, but also from symbolic music notation to audio file formats.

With the formation of the German NFDI and its NFDI4Culture consortium 3 , a dedicated workload was granted for further development on MEIGarage. Although this grant is offered to improve the music related features, the common code base of OxGarage and MEIGarage should stay strong and be developed further, for the benefit of both communities. As a first step, the repository structure was reorganized while keeping the Git history, resulting in various new repositories, so that each module/part has its own development space, version history and numbering, releases, etc. All the configuration is left to a wrapper repository that pulls together the parts required for this particular “X”Garage.

Hence, a new name for the TEI OxGarage was needed: both to emphasize its specific use for the TEI community and to strip off the now outdated Oxford legacy.

Besides restructuring and refactoring the code base, there’s some improvements and new features to be announced:

• building of the libraries and Docker images automated further,  

• security issues concerning log4j fixed,  

• Tomcat, Java, and other dependencies updated,  

• validation functionality extended for TEI files,  

• Swagger OpenApi documentation added. 

For the software to become more sustainable and up-to-date badges 4 are currently evaluated and will be used in future releases.

Bibliography

• James Cummings, Tomasz Parkoła, Mariusz Stanisławczyk and Marcin Werla: Report on the Documentation and Use of the ENRICH Garage Engine (ENRICH Reports on Deliverables WP3 D 3.4). 30 October 2009. Online at https://web.archive.org/web/20220120032211/http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ENRICH/Deliverables/ENRICH_WP3_D3.4pt1_EGE_0_0.pdf  

1 https://github.com/TEIC/oxgarage#readme

2 Projects using the OxGarage include e.g. DHConvalidator, Roma, RomaBeta, jewish-history-online.net, and Music Performance Markup.

3 https://nfdi4culture.de

4 https://fair-software.eu/ and https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org