SMART-GS

This chapter is aimed at giving an explanation of the backgrounds of SMART-GS such as the development history and the philosophy.

SMART-GS is placed as a part of the project for building WEB of ancient writings and historical materials. The basic philosophy is 'information technology for the humanities that humanities researchers really need and wish to use'. One of the distinct features of this software is that humanities researchers mainly carry out the development. Except for Aihara in charge of the most important part of the Internet infrastructure, SMART-GS is built by people involved with the humanities in some sense and has the feature, which open-source softwares originally had, that developers are also main users.

SMART-GS/HCP project has been developed for humanities researches in the world, especially for such historians as making full use of philological technique, and has a feature that one of the main users is the development leader. It is similar to the developmental form of TeX system by D. Knuth. We will be carrying out the development so that SMART-GS is a truly useful tool for humanities researchers.

SMART-GS is a free open-source software distributed under GPL2 license. Its development goes on at sourceforge.jp, a center to develop open-source softwares. SMART-GS project requires a lot of labor and creativity in order to realize its ideal. We hope that as many humanity researchers as possible enjoy benefits of the tool and ask for cooperation to develop it with us.

What is SMART-GS?

SMART-GS is a tool for text research in humanities such as history, classics, philology and linguistics.

You used to need to transcribe handwritten historical materials or old prints and retype them into electronic texts. SMART-GS now enables us to search, markup and link them directly in image files (1). It differs from searching texts generated by using OCR in that it is based on the similarity between word images, so that it is available for texts in languages whose systems of characters are unknown. It is a slightly less accurate than OCR but saves time and troubles. That enables individual researchers to do the research that used to require big fund for hiring assistants to do transcription. Thanks to these functions, you can expect that it helps a variety of researches in humanities, as useful tool for search, transcribe, analysis of old prints to which OCR is not enough available.

It is already adopted for a research in the German history of foundations of mathematics and has succeeded. The research for Kuratomi Yuzaburo's diary in modern Japanese history of politics has also started to use it. ***Besides, it is being planned to be used at seminars concerning history at the Faculty of Letters at Kyoto University.

SMART-GS is developed as a part of HCP (Humanity CyberPlatform) project, which attempts to develop practical tools for research and education on humanities and offer them to researchers and students on humanities. Its source is open to the public and you can alter it for your humanity research whenever you like (2).

History of SMART-GS

SMART-GS was born from the research in the history of foundations of mathematics by Susumu Hayashi. Hayashi about 2006 began to think of making a information tool for support working in research in Mathematics Notes by David Hilbert, a German mathematician in 19-20 century.

Hayashi, also a software engineer, came up with an idea from the resemblance between analysis of historical materials and requirements analysis in system development, he designed that tool from SMART system, a model development tool developed with students at faculty of engineering at Kobe University. The system is hence called SMART-GS (SMART- Geschichte Studie: SMART for history research). For avoiding confusion, we will hereafter call original SMART for software engineering SMART-SE (SMART-Software Engineering).

SMART-GS inherits SML, a markup language, and a part of implementation (made by Kawamura and Kazuaki Kobayashi) in SMART-SE. What is now called Reasoning Web partly inherits SAMRT-SE's requirements specification management tool (made by 潘沂冰Pan Yibing, Sul Sejoen). SMART-GS was designed by Hayashi and others at the Department of Humanistic Informatics at Kyoto University about 2006 and implemented as a part of the master's degree research by Kazuaki Kobayashi in 2006. At that time, Reasoning Web was completely rewritten but SML engine, only a small part of it, is still used.

Moreover, thanks to advice by Akihiro Yamamoto at Kyoto University, we decided to deploy the technology of image search by Yuzuru Tanaka's laboratory at Hokkaido University, and the team of Terasawa and Imura, who were at Hokkaido University at that time, made and built in the Java module for the image search function for SMART-GS.

SMART-GS, made in that manner, has applied to the research on Hilbert by Hayashi since 2007 and been demonstrated to improve efficiency in research. At the same time, the team of students at the Dept. of Humanistic Informatics, headed by Kazuhiro Kobayashi and including Simizu, Tamura and Hasimoto, modified and improved it in many respects. The development was suspended for about two years then, but it made progress after that. Kenro Aihara at National Institute of Informatics has joined since April 2010, and started to develop the information infrastructure HCP for humanity research in order to evolve SMART-GS into a cooperative tool on network, for which the research in a drastic improvement of SMART-GS got started supported by grants-in-aid for scientific research(1). Makoto Ohura and Minao Kukita, as non-tenured research fellows, have joined in this project. In addition, Hayashi himself has begun to work as a programmer. SMART-GS 0.8 is the result of these three members' working and development, which is a much improved version of existing SMART-GS. A project is now under way to build a collaboration tool via networks for humanities research by making SMART-GS a client for HCP infrastructure, which Aihara developed

It started to apply to a practical historical study, 'Research on Kuratomi Yuzaburo's Diary: To Create Complete Transcripttion and Annotation by Introducing a New IT Application Tool for Research Support' Scientific Research A represented by Kazu Nagai. In the result of this project, the first volume of Kuratomi's Diary transcription was already published. Moreover, Hayashi made a start of a research on Tanabe Hajime, who was the second leading figure in the Kyoto School, using SMART-GS, then, he has succeeded in deciphering some parts of historical materials difficult to read that had remained almost untouched for about fifty years. It is about to change the old image of Tanabe. In the background of allowing these researches to be carried out, Nagai's laboratory developed the method called "Cooperative Transcripton": many people work together in transcription using SMART-GS with a projector. It is turning out to be surprisingly effective so that even undergraduate students who are not interested in philosophy at all can read Tanabe's lecture notes that were impossible for philosophy experts to read for fifty years, as if they were fun puzzles. If this effect is provided on networks, it will affect a lot philology and history.

For the further details, please refer to the followings, though they are a little old materials (all in Japanese):

  1. Susumu Hayashi, Kazu Nagai and Izumi Miyazaki: Information Technologies for Humanities ― A View of Researchers of History and Classics― (Special Issue: "Historical Knowledge-Based Science"), Journal of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, 25(1), pp.24-31, Jan. 2010.
  2. Historical research with SMART-GS: http://www.shayashi.jp/xoops/html/modules/wordpress/index.php?p=45
  3. A tool for humanities SMART-GS and HCP project (World wide web for ancient writings with SMART-GS): http://www.astem.or.jp/virtual-lab/culture/research/r_kenkyu6, Kyoto Laboratory for Culture and Computing

Note 1: This research is supported by Scientific Research B No. 22300083, "Research on Sharing Information Infrastructure for Cooperation Facilitating Humanities", principal investigator Susumu Hayashi, co-investigators, Kenro Aihara, Comprehensive fields, Informatics, Library and Information Science/Humanistics Informatics, Information Media Study, Historical Informatics, 2010-2012.

Authors of SMART-GS

Hayashi Susumu is the main architect who invented and designed SMART-GS. A large number of people have participated in building SMART-GS since the time of SMART-SE, its predecessor. The source creators involved with the present SMART-GS are as follows (in alphabetical order):

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