bilara-data

This repository contains the published and unpublished translations, root texts, and other data from the Bilara translation app.

• The published branch is the main branch and contains finished translations and other texts. Use published branch for any form of publishing. In software terms it can be considered to be “stable”.
• The unpublished branch contains translations which are still in progress. Do not use material from unpublished except for internal SuttaCentral uses. In software terms it can be considered to be the “develop” branch. There should be no data integrity issues but there are no guarantees about the content.

Table of Contents

• Warning
• How it works
• Publication
• Inline markup
• Bilara i/o
  • Use bilara i/o
• Some notes on SC-specific data
  • Variant readings
  • References

Warning

Pull Requests such as from a fork should not be made against published branch. Instead pull requests should be made against the unpublished branch.

For manual publication workflow within this repository, please refer to https://github.com/suttacentral/bilara-data/wiki/Manual-publication-workflow

How it works

Bilara consumes json objects where:

• the key is a unique segment identifier
• the value is a string corresponding to the identifier.

cognate files

The value may be root text, translation, comments, variant readings, markup and so on. Each different kind of data is contained in files in separate directories, with one file per text. The different files pertaining to the same text are referred to as “cognate”.

The text mn1, for example, may have cognate files in:

- /root
- /html
- /translation/en
- /translation/de
- /variant

And so on. There is no theoretical limit to the number of cognates.

example

Let us look at a simple example. Here is a text with in the /root/ directory with the segment ID mn1:1.1.

"mn1:1.1": "Evaṁ me sutaṁ—",

The translation/en directory contains the same ID with a translated string:

"mn1:1.1": "So have I heard.",

There might be a comment on this in /comment/:

"mn1:1.1": "Traditionally attributed to the Buddha’s closest disciple, Ānanda.",

And some markup in /html/:

"mn1:1.1": "<p><span class='evam'>{}</span>",

Note that {} is used as placeholder for text in the /html files. By convention, use single quotes in html to avoid confusion with JSON.

Bilara texts are kept in files where one file is approximately one text. However the files are just for convenience, and may be changed by an application. For example, a very long text might be split into multiple HTML files for display on the web. However, the segment IDs should remain immutable.

Publication

Publication details are recorded canonically in _publication.json. Publications are scoped by collection such as mn, dhp, etc. Each “publication” thus corresponds roughly with a “book”. This doesn’t mean all texts in the work must be finished, it is just for convenience.

A record in _publication.json is required for every translation project. To get started, it requires at minimum:

• publication_number: a simple incremented ID.
• root_lang
• translation_lang
• author_uid — must be unique in SC, usually may be github handle.
• author_name — full name under which work will be published.
• author_github_handle — prefer something like real name.
• text_uid — select one text such as mn, dn, etc. to start.
• "is_published": "false"
• license must be set to CC0. Note that all translations supported by SuttaCentral must use CC0 licence.

If the translation is by a team, there should be a team name that is independent of the author names. Use eg. pt-team by default. It can be changed later. Collaborator details must be added as per author details above.

Other details can be added later.

Once a project is ready to be published, all relevant fields should be filled in, and set "is_published": "true".

The text will be switched to the published branch, signfying that it is ready to be consumed by apps.

Inline markup

Text inside segment strings should avoid using markup. A subset of markdown may be used, with slightly specialized meanings:

• *asterisks* mean emphasis (= <em>), usually rendered as italics.
• _underscores_ are not synonyms for asterisk, but are used when quoting a word from the root text in the translation. (= <i lang='pli' translate='no'>)
• **double asterisk** may be used to signify strong emphasis i.e. bold, but I wouldn’t encourage it! (= <strong>)
• #123 indicates a number used for counting sections. These are inherited from the Mahasangiti edition. Typically they serve to clarify the structure of complex sections. (= <span class='counter'>123</span>)

Bilara i/o

This is a utility for importing and exporting data from Bilara. It allows you to pull together the data for the same text from different directories; i.e. it collates the cognate files. It is a very flexible tool, but we envisage two main use-cases:

1. Internal SC work, especially changing segments in bilara-data
2. Consumption of bilara-data in external apps

The basic usage is to export a text or range of texts as a spreadsheet. The data can then be viewed or manipulated in the spreadsheet, and the result imported back into bilara-data.

A typical use case would be if we discover that a text has an extra unwanted segment break, we can combine two segments into one, delete the old segment, and re-import it. Changing this in the raw json files is tricky, as you have to keep track of all the different files of that particular text, and re-increment the segment numbering.

Bilara i/o uses Pyexcel under the hood, so data can be imported and exported to any format supported by pyexcel. However we have only extensively tested it with .ods spreadsheets.

Use bilara i/o

Go to the .scripts folder. Change the python version to 3.7.2. (Other versions may work if you have a different version installed.) Run something like:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Ready to go, let’s export dn1 as a tsv file, which can be opened as a spreadsheet!

./sheet_export.py dn1 dn1.tsv

Edit it, save, and run:

 ./sheet_import.py dn1.tsv

Et voila, your changes appear in the bilara data file.

You can easily do something like this, too:

./sheet_export.py dn dn.tsv --include root, translation+en

“Export the whole of DN as a tsv file, including only the root text and English translation”.

Some notes on SC-specific data

Variant readings

The structure of the variant readings entries is as follows.

Here is a typical simple entry.

"an10.96:1.3": "Tapodāya → tapode (bj, mr)",

Which means:

"On this segment, the root text (lemma) 'Tapodāya' has a variant 'tapode' indicated by an arrow, which is found in the bj and mr editions."

The details for each edition is found in uid_expansion.

More generally:

"segment": "lemma → variant (edition)"

Editions are separated by commas, as above. Where the same lemma has multiple variants in different editions, semi-colon is used.

"an10.98:1.10": "abhikkantapaṭikkante → abhikkante paṭikkante (bj); abhikkantapaṭikkanto (mr)"

"The lemma 'abhikkantapaṭikkante' has a variant 'abhikkante paṭikkante' in the bj edition, and another variant 'abhikkantapaṭikkanto' in the mr edition."

When multiple lemmas have variants on the same segment, pipe | is used as separator.

an10.99:6.2": "vaṅkakaṁ → vaṅkaṁ (si, pts-vp-pli1ed) | ciṅgulakaṁ → piṅgulikaṁ (sya-all); ciṅkulakaṁ (mr)"

"The lemma 'vaṅkakaṁ' has a variant 'vaṅkaṁ' in the si and pts-vp-pli1ed editions. In addition, the lemma 'ciṅgulakaṁ' has the variant 'piṅgulikaṁ' in the sya-all edition, and another variant 'ciṅkulakaṁ' in the mr edition."

The use of empty brackets indicates a place in the mahasangiti edition where a passage was not found, but was present in other editions.

an2.49:1.6": "() → (visamattā bhikkhave parisāya adhammakammāni pavattanti … vinayakammāni na dippanti.) (bj, sya-all, pts-vp-pli1ed)",

"In the place marked by (), the passage 'visamattā bhikkhave parisāya adhammakammāni pavattanti … vinayakammāni na dippanti.' is found in the bj, sya-all, and pts-vp-pli1ed editions."

Occasionally the variants offer a short explanation in Pali as to an unusual textual situation.

an11.6:1.1": "etthantare pāṭho si, sya-all, km, pts-vp-pli1ed potthakesu na

"The indicated passage is not found in the si, sya-all, km, and pts-vp-pli1ed editions."

References

The reference files contain detailed references to over a dozen editions of the Pali canon. These were originally collated by the Dhamma Society for their Mahsaṅgīti edition, and have been supplemented by SuttaCentral.

The full forms of the abbreviations may be found in pali_edition.json.

GitHub Actions

There are three GitHub Actions workflows that are run in this repository.

1. run-tests-on-pr.yml
2. push-changes-to-sc-data.yml
3. check-migration.yml

All three found here: bilara-data/.github/workflows.

run-tests-on-pr.yml is run whenever a pull request is made for the published branch of bilara-data. This workflow is responsible for running tests that insure the integrity of bilara-data. The tests are run everytime a pull request is opened, updated via a push, or re-opened. If the tests fail, ability to merge the pull request will be blocked. Below is an overview of the steps performed in the workflow:

• clones the suttacentral/bilara-data-integrity repo
• clones the suttacentral/bilara-data repo into the bilara-data-integrity repo
• gets a list of JSON files that have been changed since the last successful run (if there are any) by calling git diff on the bilara-data repo
• gets a list of JSON files that have been deleted since the last successful run (if there are any) by calling git diff on the bilara-data repo
• passes those files to sutta-processor, which has been modified to run on a per-file basis, rather than on the whole of bilara-data
• if there are no errors, the ability to merge the pull request is enabled

The commit SHAs used in the calls to git diff are github.event.pull_request.base.sha and github.event.pull_request.head.sha. github.event.pull_request.base.sha is the commit SHA of the target branch (published). github.event.pull_request.head.sha is the commit SHA of the source branch (the branch that will be merged into published).

push-changes-to-sc-data.yml is responsible for pushing the changes to sc-data after run-tests-on-pr.yml has completed successfully. It performs a similar series of steps to run-tests-on-pr.yml, but doesn't run the tests and runs the Nilakkhana transform script on the changed files before pushing them to sc-data. It also uses different commit SHAs. It uses github.event.before, which is the SHA of the most recent commit before the push and github.sha, which is the commit SHA of the pull request's merge commit.

All the steps after the calls to git diff in both workflows have conditional statements checking the existence of changed or deleted files. If none are found, then the steps are skipped.

check-migration.yml compares the bilara-data files and the Yuttadhammo source texts. It ensures that the work done on the bilara-data texts haven't introduced unwanted changes or deletions. It uses the on.schedule event to trigger the workflow. This workflow run independently of the bilara-data -> sc-data workflows. So failure of this workflow does not affect the ability to create or merge pull requests.