The DAPCA Project
A Digital Repository for Peripheral Cuneiform Archives from Late Bronze Age Western Asia
Purpose and scope of this Wiki
This documentation serves as a comprehensive guide to the DAPCA framework, designed to facilitate user navigation through its various functionalities and conceptual architecture. To enable effective utilization of the platform, the documentation addresses two complementary dimensions:
Foundational concepts: The underlying data model and theoretical principles that inform DAPCA's approach to representing cuneiform documentation. This includes explanation of the repository structure specifically engineered to accommodate the distinctive characteristics of logo-syllabic writing systems. Understanding these foundational concepts enables users to formulate more effective queries and interpret search results.
Interface navigation and functionality: A systematic overview of the web interface architecture, organized by functional domains. Each section of the documentation describes the purpose, capabilities, and operational logic of specific interface components — including the catalogue and database of texts, search engine, interactive text viewer, annotation system, and bibliographic integration. This functional documentation is structured to support both rapid orientation for new users and detailed reference for advanced applications.
Together, these complementary strands of documentation aim to support users with varying levels of expertise — from students encountering cuneiform texts for the first time to specialists pursuing sophisticated philological and historical investigations—ensuring that the platform's analytical capabilities remain accessible without sacrificing scholarly rigor or technical precision.
Disclaimer
This guide documents and illustrates all features of the DAPCA project, including those reserved for users with advanced credentials. As a result, some parts of the text — and some screenshots — will inevitably differ from what a standard user observes in the portal. The guide nonetheless remains a single, general text that captures, in its entirety, the underlying principles that shaped the application's design; splitting it by permission level would only have made parts of the documentation incomprehensible. Understanding the project's underlying structure, moreover, also pays off in more effective searches.