Canonical Text Services

Available

 * http://cite-architecture.github.io/cts/ (dead link since January 2019: Wayback version)
 * http://www.homermultitext.org/hmt-docs/cite/ (older version)

Authors

 * Christopher Blackwell
 * Neel Smith

Description
Canonical Text Services (CTS) is a protocol to identify and retrieve passages of text cited by canonical reference.

The Canonical (previously 'Classical') Text Services specification defines a network service for identifying texts and retrieving fragments of texts using notions of "work" and "citation" traditional in classical studies and other literary disciplines.

CTS is part of the CITE architecture, developed by Blackwell and Smith to meet the needs of the Homer Multitext project.

Applications

 * One classical project which uses Canonical Text Services is the Homer Multitext (cf. information on its blog).
 * The Perseus Digital Library also relies on CTS architecture, see . Perseus' CTS end-point is accessible at http://cts.perseids.org/api/cts/? (an interface to browse the repository can be found at http://cts.perseids.org/).
 * The corpus Croatiae auctores Latini (CroALa) is in the process of adding support for the CTS protocol. For a subset of CTS-compliant texts from CroALa see https://github.com/nevenjovanovic/hc-croala
 * The texts in Alpheios Tools are available via a CTS API (endpoint at http://repos1.alpheios.net/exist/rest/db/xq/CTS.xq?)

Code Libraries/Tools
(see list of tools at http://cts.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/tools.html and http://cite-architecture.github.io/cts/#implementations-and-code-tools)

Useful Resources

 * CITE Architecture


 * A Brief Guide to the CTS URNs


 * A CiteULike CTS bibliography by Alison Babeu.


 * A research group based at the University of Leipzig and led by Gerhard Heyer has a website with information about CTS: http://cts.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/

Older code and documentation addresses
URL: http://chs75.harvard.edu/projects/diginc/techpub/cts (Dead link: 2014-07-10) (Archive)

The project also has a Sourceforge site, with more recent information: http://cts3.sourceforge.net/ (last released January 2015)

There is a mailing list: http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cts3-general (no posts since Nov 2015)