What is this?

This django web app is part of a masterthesis.

The app displays the session protocols of the german Bundestag from 1949 till 2017. Besides that the app provides an Ngram Viewer that displays word frequencies over time for all those protocols. Th Ngram Viewer and its functionality is similar to the Google Ngram Viewer.

The n-gram data and the protocols have been created using this software (also part of the same masterthesis): https://gitlab.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/sporada/bundesdata_markup_nlp_software

The actual data can be found here: https://gitlab.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/sporada/bundesdata_markup_nlp_data

Installation

Systemrequirements

• docker 18.09.1-ce
• docker-compose 1.23.2
• unix-like OS

Install requirements

1. First install docker for your OS according to this guide: https://docs.docker.com/install/
2. After that install docker-compose for you system according to this guide: https://docs.docker.com/compose/install/
3. Clone this reposiory with git clone https://gitlab.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/sporada/bundesdata_web_app.git to a location of your choice.

Build the app/start the app with docker

1. Navigate into the repository with cd path/to/the/repository.
2. Start the web app with docker-compose up. Doing this the first time will take some time because all the needed images (postgres, python and nginx) will have to be downloaded. Also all the packages defined in the Pipfile will be installed in the according image. This terminal will stay open for now to show the log messages of the three running containers.
3. Check if the app is running by visiting 127.0.0.1:8000
4. The website should be showing up. But it looks kind of broken. To fix this collect the needed static files (css, images, javascripts etc.). Open a second terminal in the same location as the running one and execute docker-compose run web python manage.py collectstatic.
5. Answere the question with yes if needed.
6. Reload 127.0.0.1:8000 to verfiy that the files have been successfully imported. The website should look pretty nice now.

Import the data into the database

1. Befor importing the data we have to setup the tables in the PostgreSQL database. Do this with docker-compose run web python manage.py makemigrations followed by docker-compose run web python manage.py migrate.
2. Now the data for the ngrams, speeches, and speakers has to be imported into the database of the app.
3. Shutdown the app with the command docker-compose down.
4. Change the owner rights of all files in the repository. This has to be done because every process inside a docker container is always executed with root privilage. Thus the created volumes are not accessable anymore. Change the rights with sudo chown -R $USER:$USER . This is only needed for linux systems.
5. Download the folders MdB_data and outputs from the link mentioned in this repository and copy those into the folder input_volume which is located inside the web app repository on the root level. If the downloaded folders are inside an archive extract the folders first. This folder is a volume which is mounted into the web app container. The contianer is able to read every data inside that volume. Note that the volume is accessed with the path /usr/src/app/input_data not /usr/src/app/input_volume.
6. Restart the app with docker-compose up
7. First we have to import the speaker data. This will be done by executing following command docker-compose run web python manage.py import_speakers /usr/src/app/input_data/MdB_data/MdB_Stammdaten.xml in the second terminal.
8. After that we can import all the protocols and thus all speeches for every person. The command to do that is docker-compose run web python manage.py import_protocols /usr/src/app/input_data/outputs/markup/full_periods (Importing all protocols takes up to 2 days. For testing purposes dev_data/beautiful_xml or test_data/beautiful_xml can be used.)
9. Now the n-grams can be imported by using docker-compose run web python manage.py import_ngrams_bulk 1 /usr/src/app/input_data/outputs/nlp/full_periods/n-grams/lm_ns_year/1_grams lm_ns_year. This command imports the alphabetically splitted n-grams into their according tables. First parameter of this command is 1. This tells the function to import the n-grams from the input path as 1-grams. Therefore the second parameter is the inputpath /usr/src/app/input_data/outputs/nlp/full_periods/n-grams/lm_ns_year/1_grams where the 1-grams are located. The last part of the input path clearly identifies the n-grams as 1-grams. Finally the third parameter identifies what kind of n-grams are being imported. In this case the parameter is set to lm_ns_year which means the ngrams are based on lemmatized text without stopwords counted by year. An example to import 2-grams would look like this docker-compose run web python manage.py import_ngrams_bulk 2 /usr/src/app/input_data/outputs/nlp/full_periods/n-grams/lm_ns_year/2_grams lm_ns_year. To import 3-grams from a different corpus the command for example should look like this: docker-compose run web python manage.py import_ngrams_bulk 3 /usr/src/app/input_data/outputs/nlp/full_periods/n-grams/tk_ws_speaker_\(1-3\)/3_grams tk_ws_speaker. Be careful when importing the n-grams. If the parameters are set wrong, the n-grams will be imported into the wrong tables and thus leading to incorrect findings using the Ngram Viewer. If you did something wrong you can reset the database with docker-compose run web python manage.py flush and start the data import again. It is possible to import different n-gram sets at the same time using multiple commands in multiple terminals. Just keep an eye out on the CPU and RAM usage. There is also an optional fourth parameter to set the batch size of one insert. The default is set to read 1 million rows from the csv and insert them at once into the database. The parameter -bs 10000000 would set it to 10 million. Increasing that value also increases the RAM usage so be careful with that.
10. Repeate the step above for every kind of n-gram data you want to import. Importing 1-grams will only take some minutes while importing 5-grams will take several hours. (For testing purposes the n-grams from dev_data can be used.)
11. After importing the n-grams the web app is all set up.
12. The app can be shut down with docker-compose down. All imported data is saved persistently in the database volume postgres_data.
13. To restart the app use docker-compose up or docker-compose -d to start it detatched.

Security settings for hosting your own public version

Before hosting you own version of this website pulblicly do not forget to change the PostgreSQL username, password etc. in docker-compose.yml and app/bundesdata_app/settings.py. Also change the secret key mentioned in app/bundesdata_app/settings.py to a new django key that you will keep secret!

Live version

A live version of the app is running under http://129.70.12.88:8000/ inside the University Bielefeld network. You have to access the university network via VPN to be able to use the live version. (https://www.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/search/vpn/)