Xaira is the current name for a new version of SARA, the text searching software originally developed at OUCS for use with the British National Corpus. This new version has been entirely re-written as a general purpose XML search engine, which will operate on any corpus of well-formed XML documents. It is however best used with TEI-conformant documents.
Xaira has full Unicode support. This means you can use it to search and display text in any language, provided you have a suitable Unicode font installed on your system.
At the heart of Xaira is the Xaira Object Model. This defines a range of objects and methods for representing and searching large amounts of linguistic data. The Xaira Server program implements this model. The Xaira Indexer program creates platform-independent indexes from collections of XML documents for use by the Server. Both these Xaira components can be deployed on any platform.
Client programs can access a Xaira server using a close-coupled API such as that used by the Windows client (which is written in C ), or via XMLRPC or SOAP. We provide a fully-featured client for Windows, and a PHP code library which makes it easy to develop applications for the web which can talk to a Xaira server.
All versions of Xaira are now distributed free of charge under the GNU General Public Licence.
Xaira has been developed with funding from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation and the British National Corpus Consortium.
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