Hello All,
On Wednesday 3rd February, a hard disk failure occurred on one of the two web servers used to host the Quranic Arabic Corpus. This has lead to a reduced service on the website over the last 24 hours. The entire website is working correctly, with the exception of not being able to post new messages on the message board. This last issue is under investigation, and I hope to help to get this resolved soon. However, viewing existing messages, and making use of the word-by-word grammatical information is also working, as is the rest of the website. My apologies for this, hopefully this will be up and running again shortly. Despite this technical issue, the website has successfully served 11,637 user page views with no down-time during the last 48 hours. I think that is important to point out that the server and database hosting required to power the dynamic website is all run quite professionally, but on a volunteer basis as part of a sub-domain under quran.com. The kind efforts and technical expertise of the team behind quran.com have meant that the corpus website was up and running again quite quickly, and because two web servers are used for backup redundancy, there was no loss of service at any time. My kind and sincere thanks go out to the team who run and maintain these web servers, free of charge as a volunteer educational and humanitarian effort to promote deeper understanding of the Quran. The Quranic Arabic Corpus website is resource intensive, since much of the grammatical information and syntactic images are generated on-demand when a specific verse of the Quran is requested by a user for the first time. The website is hosted on two dedicated web servers, with the linguistic database hosted on a separate third server. The hard disk failure has meant that messages for a single day have also been lost (a few dozen grammatical corrections). Going forward, this should not occur again, since more frequent twice-daily backups of the message board will hopefully be put in place. Most of the website's pages are generated dynamically by the two hosted web servers from a set of core tags and features encoded in the linguistic database. To give some idea of the scale of the website’s dynamic information, if only the brief grammatical information was printed, together with the morphological word segment images, at a very small half font-size compared to the online web pages, then the word-by-word interlinear format alone (http://corpus.quran.com/wordbyword.jsp) would take up 5,530 A4 pages - assuming no extra website banners or menus. This is equivalent to about 10 large and dense volumes of printed grammatical information, with detailed colored and segmented images for each of the Arabic words in the Quran. These 10 large printed volumes would exclude the treebank and many other parts of the website. I hope that volunteer annotators would please be patient for a short while, until full message board functionally is restored. Please also accept my apologies if you have to register and sign-in through the website again, hopefully this should not happen again. I will be sure to let you all know when things are fully up and running. Once things are working, it would be very kind if corpus annotators might consider reposting the last few dozen or lost corrections to words. Kind Regards, -- Kais Dukes Language Research Group School of Computing University of Leeds http://corpus.quran.com - The Quranic Arabic Corpus comp-quran@comp.leeds.ac.uk - Computational Quranic Arabic discussion list
