Knowing CLAUDIA...

This is a draft 1.0 release of CL.A.U.D.I.A., acronym for Computational and Updatable Dongba Iconographic Archives.

CL.A.U.D.I.A. is an interdisciplinary project of Human Technology application focused about Dongba pictographic writing system of Naxi people of South-West China, implemented and uploaded on Web for an on-fly demo during Kunming's 16th International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (29 - 31 July).

This is just a short introduction page to CL.A.U.D.I.A.; for more details and starting browsing iconographic index plates please visit dedicated page.

I wish to underline importance of Updatable features of CL.A.U.D.I.A. system - which I feel is needed - because of continuous evolution of academic scores in studying Dongba and Geba writing systems and Naxi culture...and myself.

On Your left side, You can see the two main resources of Claudia: Index Plates of Dongba Pictographs and dictionary.

Index plates consist in a tree of family and sub-family of pictographs stored and gathered by ICONOGRAPHIC features. Please visit dedicated page for correct usage. Each plates of pictographs are implemented as index archives of pictograph, labelled by capital key-letter for Family and minus keyletter for sub-Family of pictographs, then each elements has its own identification number.

CL.A.U.D.I.A.'s dictionary is then implemented with 3 main resources:

  1. At first, from top, a fast free-keywords search-engine is realized, to lunch specific and fast interrogation query on pictograph database. Please, note that EACH QUERY WILL GENERATE 2 MAIN FILEDS OF DATA RETRIEVING: on the top a DIRECT MATCHING SCORE, with the output of the whole pictograph directly matched in its translation to the keyword of research; down an INDIRECT MATCHING SCORE, constituted by the group of pictographs retrieved because of their indirect matching - but existing relation - with the keywords of the query lounched. Such Information Retrieval System is yet implementing.
  2. English - Dongba dictionary by keywords. Keyword queries will generate direct and indirect matching pictograph retrieving.
  3. Naxi pinyin sillables search form: by clicking of Naxi syllable CL.A.U.D.I.A.s. will retrieve pictographs which latinization contains searched syllable as initial or inside thw whole pinyin transcription. Syllable ortography specify IPA phonetic equivalences.

Dictionary page is better introduced here in English <--> Dongba cidian dedicated intro page.

I am implementing such resource under PHP <--> MySql couple, that's because I feel MySql as the best database instrument I know for building digitals archives and structured databases as Dongba pictographs corpus, and PHP as the dearest and the most flexible instrument to me for managing and generating intelligent and dynamic queries targeting Dongba pictographic writing system significants corpus stored in MySql database; some hidden fields of database should work as Ontology for hierarchy relationship between family, subfamily and single pictographs.