We recently wrapped up a project to develop a set of components for SEASR
to do TEI analysis[1].  There are a couple of ways to call SEASR flows -
you can either use ZigZag[2] to script flow construction & execution, or
you can set up a flow as a web service using their web service endpoint
components.  We never got the latter approach to work reliably in a
production environment, so YMMV.

[1]http://teicomponents.wordpress.com/
[2]http://seasr.org/meandre/documentation/for-developers/zigzag/

On Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 3:05 PM, Eric Lease Morgan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Does anybody here have any experience with SEASR, Meandre, and CGI?
> Specifically, I want to know if it is possible call a SEASR "flow" from a
> CGI script.
>
> As you may or may not know SEASR is a pretty cool tool for doing various
> textual analysis. [1]. Using a browser-based GUI, a person can stitch
> together all sorts of functions to do things like get input, read data from
> a file system, parse text with things like parts-of-speach tools, tabulate
> the results, feed them to a visualization, and return an image. The
> underlying server software which does all the work -- Meandre -- is Web
> services-based and (apparently) relies heavily on RDF. [2]
>
> The SEASR/Meandre combination seems to be designed to work on an
> individual's desktop, not necessarily from a server. Download software,
> start Meandre, open connection to localhost, download components, write
> programs (called "flows"), run flows, get output. All of this is well and
> good, but I would like to create a more Web-based interface to these
> "flows" as opposed to a localhost, browser-based interface.
>
> In other words, I would like to a write a (Perl) script that gets input
> from an HTML form, sends the input along to a flow saved in Meandre, has
> the result returned to the script, and then passes the result back to the
> browser. This way the wonderful functionality of SEASR/Meandre could be
> used by a much wider audience of students and researchers. If I were able
> to implement this idea, then I could create all sorts of "kewl" URLs
> returning interesting information about all sorts of texts.
>
> Do you know how to write a CGI script that calls SEASR/Meandre flows?
>
>
> [1] SEASR - http://seasr.org/
> [2] Meandre - http://seasr.org/meandre/
>
> --
> Eric Lease Morgan
> University of Notre Dame
>



-- 
Andrew Ashton
Director of Digital Technologies
Brown University Library