Overview

The RefLex website address is https://reflex.cnrs.fr/Africa/ . It contains a public part for data consultation and a private part for (public or private) data manipulation, requiring a user account.

The published data are organized as sources which are the association of a bibliographic reference (a reference in WebBall ) and a language (a reference in WebCal ). Each source is associated to a set of records having at least a form and a (French or English) translation.

• Overview
  • Screen layout
    • Header
    • Breadcrumb Trail
    • Explorer
    • Toolbar
    • Active elements
    • Available elements
    • Tools
    • Footer
  • Objects
  • Operations
  • Modules
  • Other tools

Screen layout

The website is divided into eight zones, offering a quickly identifiable structure throughout the navigation. In detail, these eight zones are:

• Header: contains logos, titles, links to related sites, and connection tools.
• Breadcrumb trail: allows the user to track where they are and browse between different levels.
• Explorer: allows the user to browse among selected objects and to select search criteria.
• Toolbar: for selected items (visible in Active elements). This bar is displayed only when necessary.
• Active Elements: contains the object that is being created or modified.
• Available elements: elements that have been retrieved by browsing and/or a search in the Explorer zone.
• Tools: a box on the left hand site of the screen, accessible only to registered users. It gives different options depending on which view you are using.
• Footer: includes the legal information about the website and its partners, as well as quick access to the most visited parts of the site.

Header

This zone contains the RefLex logo, a background image, links to the related website LLACAN et DDL).
On the right hand side of the header, a box contains information and tools related to the status of the user. When accessing the website, these are:

• to log in
• to create an account
• to open the RefLex Wiki (A REVOIR !)
• to open and close a box identifying the icons of the website.

Once the user is logged in, apart from the , , icons seen above, these are:

• to log out
• to report a bug to the webmaster
• to edit the user account

Breadcrumb Trail

The breadcrumb trail shows at a glance what the user is currently doing in the database. The top contains the modules and the bottom contains the menus.

Explorer

At all levels of website exploration, you will find in this part of the interface the main ways to explore and search the data. The selected objects have a toolbar. Because this part is very important, it will be further developed at each level of data visualization.

Toolbar

The toolbar often contains three parts:

• The first part provides shortcuts to other tools (search , share , create dataset , edit cognate set , make alignment ).
• The second part includes the possible operations on a dataset, a recordset or a cognate set.
• The third part includes the possible operations on sources in a dataset, on records in a recordset or a cognate set.

Active elements

This zone contains features as reminder of items that are currently being handled, which can be sources, datasets, records, cognate sets, recordsets, alignments or correspondence sets.

By default, all (source/dataset/record) boxes are checked, you can invert the selection by using the icon.

Available elements

This zone contains the objects that you select while browsing Explorer and by using search tools will be displayed in this section. You can select them individually or as a bundle to transfer them into Active elements (where it will be possible to make operations).
The icon will empty this zone.

Tools

This zone contains tools under development.

Footer

This contains legal information about the website, bibliographic references for citation in articles based on work carried out using RefLex, a list of enriched internal links and a direct link to the administrator's e-mail address.

Objects

RefLex provides two types of objects:

• Basic objects of the database:
• Sources
• Records

These two objects are composed by several fields (only searchable fields are presented here).

A source is composed by the following fields:

• Citation
• authors
• Transcriptor
• Description
• Origin
• Comments

Each source contains records. A record is composed by the following fields. There are three kinds of fields: original fields (from the author), unified fields (from the expert), and fields filled by algorithms.

• Dataset
• Recordset
  
• Cognate set
  
• Alignment
• Correspondence set
  
• Query
• Inventory
• Note
• Tag

From these objects, several modules, tools and operations are available.

Operations

Several operations are available via the icons in the toolbars.

• Modification
• Deletion
• Addition
• Sharing
• Adding tag
• Creating comment

Modules

Modules are:

• Data module: This module presents all the transversal data contained in RefLex (sources, records, datasets, recordsets). You can browse in the various existing objects.
• Reconstruction module: this module includes all the reconstruction tools. You can browse in all the nested objects from a dataset (cognate set, alignment, correspondence).
• Statistics module: this module includes statistic tools.
• Wordlist module: this module includes comparison tools.
• Management module: this module includes gestion and right tools on the different objects.

There are available from the breadcrumb trail.

Two derived modules from RefLex, MAPme et STATme , are available online as a standalone services.

• STATme module: this module contains tools from the statistic module in direct access. You can work on row data. (See STATme manual)
• MAPme module: this module contains cartography tools. You can work on row data. (See MAPme manual).

Other tools

Main tools are:

• Search
• Map visualisation
• Tree visualisation