Opaque is a virtual research environment (VRE) bundling OCR, NLP and additional computer linguistic methods for research purposes in the field of Digital Humanities.
Opaque is designed as a web application which can be easily used by researchers to aid them during their research process.
In particular researchers can use Opaque to start OCR jobs for digitized sources. The text output of these OCR jobs can then be used as an input for tagging processes (POS, NER etc.).
The generated computational workload is handled by a [Docker](https://docs.docker.com/) swarm. A swarm is a group of machines that are running Docker and joined into a cluster. It consists out of two different kinds of members, managers and workers. Currently it is not possible to specify a dedicated Docker host, instead Opaque expects the executing system to be a swarm manager of a cluster with at least one dedicated worker machine. The swarm setup process is described best in the [Docker documentation](https://docs.docker.com/engine/swarm/swarm-tutorial/).
A shared network space is necessary so that all swarm members have access to all the data. To achieve this a [Samba](https://www.samba.org/) can be used.
For production environments it is recommended to activate and secure the Docker HTTP API. You can read more [here](https://gitlab.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/sfb1288inf/opaque_daemon).
<YOUREDITOR> nopaque.env # Fill out the empty variables within this file. For the gitlab login either use your credentials (not recommended) Or create a gitlab token