Hierarchical Structure
The TextAPI organizes digital scholarly editions into a simple, predictable hierarchy. This structure makes it easy for clients and services to navigate large corpora, retrieve individual texts, and understand how resources relate to each other.
Collection
A collection is the top‑level container. It groups multiple editions or related resources under a single entry point. A collection typically provides:
- Basic metadata (title, description, provider)
- A list of available manifests
- Optional links to related services (SearchAPI, AnnotationAPI, etc.)
Collections are ideal for representing a project, corpus, or institutional repository, but they are defined to be flexible. A set of search results might be a collection on its own.
Manifest
A manifest describes a single edition or textual object within a collection. It contains:
- Edition‑level metadata (authors, publication info, license)
- Structural information about the edition
- A list of items that make up the text
Manifests act as the “table of contents” for an edition, telling clients like TIDO how to load and display the material.
Item
An item is the smallest addressable unit in the hierarchy. Each item represents a concrete piece of content, such as:
- A chapter or section
- A page or folio
- A standalone text block
Items contain the actual IRIs for the serializations of a text body. They point to external resources, like HTML files, reading interfaces ultimately render.
Complete Example
The following example shows an embedded resource, meaning the item data is embedded within the manifest and the manifest is embedded in the collection. Embedding data allows efficient resource requests and returns all information for a complete TextAPI resource rendering.
Code