Corpora: Software release: BNCweb

[Sebastian Hoffmann]

We would like to announce the release of BNCweb, a web-based
interface to the 100-million word British National Corpus.


***What is BNCweb?***

BNCweb is a user-friendly, web-based client program for searching and
retrieving lexical, grammatical and textual data from the British
National Corpus (BNC). It relies on the BNC server program, SARA, to
provide a convenient interface between the user and the rich variety
of annotated text in the 100-million word BNC. Thanks to its
integration of MySQL, a very fast SQL-database server, BNCweb is able
to extend the functionality of SARA. It thus offers a whole range of
additional features for corpus analysis, such as:

- distribution of the query result over various metatextual categories
- very flexible collocation analysis
- tag sequence search (for retrieving grammatical patterns)
- sort
- user-definable frequency lists (restricted e.g. to certain
patterns, POS-tags)
- etc.

BNCweb can be accessed by several users at the same time -
performance will vary according to your hardware set-up. At Zurich
University, we have had 20 concurrent users without experiencing a
major slow-down of the system. Of course, BNCweb can also be used on
a stand-alone computer (i.e. with the web-browser and web-server on
the same machine).

Please consult the BNCweb homepage (http://homepage.mac.com/bncweb)
for more detailed information about the individual features. An
extensive manual is also available.


***Availability***

BNCweb is now available for non-commercial use. You can order your
own copy for a shipping and handling fee of 30 Euro. (No restrictions
apply as to the number of installations or users per institution.)
This fee includes notification of future upgrades and some basic
support by e-mail. For more extensive support, special conditions
apply. Further information can be found at
http://homepage.mac.com/bncweb.


***System and Installation Requirements***

BNCweb requires no special installation procedure or client program
*on the part of the end user* - any web-browser (under any kind of
operating system) can be used to access the BNC via the internet or a
local area network.

On the server side, a BNCweb installation requires:

- a UNIX server (e.g. Linux, Mac OS X)
- a full installation of the BNC World Edition (see http://info.ox.ac.uk/bnc/)
- some additional UNIX tools (e.g. MySQL, Perl)

In its current version (2.0), BNCweb is exclusively compatible with
the BNC World Edition. Users with an installation of the first
release of the BNC will have to purchase a copy of the BNC World
Edition before being able to use BNCweb.


The BNCweb team: Hans Martin Lehmann, Sebastian Hoffmann and Peter
Schneider (all Zurich University)
e-mail: bncweb at mac.com

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Sebastian Hoffmann
Englisches Seminar der Univ. Zürich
Plattenstrasse 47
CH-8032 Zürich
Tel: +41-1-634 3551
Fax: +41-1-634 4908