CBOLD has been developing a wide range of computational tools in order to process and display our data. In the past, much of our data was written for the FoxPro database program for very particular needs. However, as the project has moved more and more onto the world wide web, we have begun to develop a set of tools, written in PERL, which are used to serve our internal processing needs as well as allow us to make our databases searchable on the web.
We are making publicly available the set of PERL routines used to create our online searches. Unfortunately, there is no documentation for them, but the code is extensively commented. These routines are designed to create search forms based on text files with tab-delimited fields. Three basic types of searches have been created: (i) a standard dictionary/word-list search, (ii) a specialized search system for databases with a large number of fields (used for the TLS search), and (iii) a bibliographic search. They all operate on the same basic principles and differ only in details of implementation. The routines require the CGI perl module (CGI.PM), and can be downloaded here. Please e-mail Jeff Good (jcgood@socrates.berkeley.edu) with questions or comments.
In addition to the search routines, we are developing a set of utilities for linking our dictionaries to each other, as well as to a database of Proto-Bantu reconstructions. If you want to find out what we have put together so far, please e-mail Jeff Good (jcgood@socrates.berkeley.edu) or Ron Sprouse (ronald@uclink.berkeley.edu). We will be happy to share our work with other researchers.