Oxford Dictionary API, Part III

Looking up words in the OED with XQuery

This example demonstrates a playful text-rewriting process where each word in a sentence is replaced by a synonym retrieved from the Oxford Dictionaries API. It begins by sending two HTTP requests to the Oxford Dictionaries API endpoints for word definitions and synonyms, then defines a custom XQuery function that isolates the first synonym for a given word. The main logic tokenizes the input sentence and applies this synonym-lookup function iteratively, finally rejoining the substituted words into a new sentence. The visualization relies on XQuery’s HTTP client capabilities for API interaction and string manipulation functions to process the text, with no graphical rendering involved.

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A little playful XQuery

This playful XQuery example transforms a user’s phrase by replacing each word with a random antonym fetched from the Oxford Dictionaries API. It demonstrates a game-like text manipulation, showing the original sentiment inverted. The code uses XQuery 3.1, the `http:send-request` and `random:integer` functions, and the MarkLogic HTTP client to query the Oxford entry endpoint. For each word, it retrieves antonym sets, picks one randomly, and falls back to the original word when no antonym exists.

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For XQuery4Humanists

This example visualizes the frequency and distribution of words extracted from a TEI-encoded poem, processing the text to remove punctuation, normalize case, and tokenize it into a list. The visualization shows the resulting word list as a simple textual display, highlighting the raw output of the XQuery processing pipeline. The code uses XQuery 3.0 functions like `fn:tokenize`, `fn:lower-case`, and `fn:replace` to clean the data, pulling the source directly from a remote XML file hosted on GitHub. The rendering relies solely on the XQuery return, with no additional JavaScript or charting libraries involved.

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Code snippets for XQuery Working Group (Text Mining at Scale)

This example demonstrates a text-mining workflow for querying the Victorian Women Writers Project corpus stored in a BaseX database, using XQuery and XPath Full Text 1.0. It walks through creating structured records from TEI XML, saving them to a new database, and running full-text searches with scoring, stemming, and thesaurus-based matching. The code exercises functions like `db:replace`, `ft:mark`, and `ft:extract` to highlight matching text, while also showing stop-word filtering and boolean operators for queries.

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{$title}

This example demonstrates a minimal XQuery web application for the Corpus Baudelaire project, serving static XHTML pages and dynamic poem routes. It shows how RESTXQ annotations declare endpoints for the root path, an about page, a credits page, and a parameterized poem URL, with each route returning a simple HTML document via a shared display function. The code relies on the RESTXQ API for request routing and the XQuery standard library for string concatenation and element construction, though it renders no actual data visualization.

Gist ccc08dae693660d7aa1b8cf2708fd13d

This example demonstrates how to query and highlight text passages in the Victorian Women Writers Project TEI corpus using XQuery 3.1. It shows a progression from simple full-text searches for repeated terms to fuzzy matching via `ft:search` and `ft:extract`, and finally visualizes results by marking hits with `ft:mark` and segmenting them into tumbling windows. The code relies on BaseX’s full-text and windowing capabilities to extract and structure paragraph-level matches containing “garden” or “house.”

Experiments with XQuery, RESTXQ, and MVC in BaseX

This example demonstrates a model-view-controller (MVC) architecture for serving a web-based corpus of Charles Baudelaire’s poems, with XQuery functions defining RESTful routes. It shows how BaseX’s RESTXQ annotations (`%rest:path`, `%rest:GET`) map URLs like `/`, `/about`, and `/contents` to controller functions, while a separate view module generates XHTML pages with Bootstrap styling. The model module queries the `fleurs-du-mal` collection to extract contributor names and poem titles for dynamic content. The code highlights XQuery’s role in both server-side logic and HTML templating, without any client-side JavaScript or charting libraries.

RESTXQ example using map:find with BaseX 6.0 beta

This example demonstrates a RESTXQ service that queries the Open Library API for book titles and returns matching results as XML. The code defines an XQuery function annotated with `%rest:path` and `%rest:GET`, which receives a book title and a key parameter. It constructs a URL to the Open Library search endpoint, retrieves the JSON response using `fn:json-doc`, then flattens and searches the resulting structure with `array:flatten` and `map:find` from BaseX 6.0. The matched items are wrapped in a custom `results` element.