Holmes is an app and platform that allows anyone to visualise their books with just their smartphone. By finding all characters and locations within an EPUB book using NLP named entity recognition. It can give visualisations of character appearances that can help readers remember the plot of chapters by looking at which characters appeared where and with whom they have interacted.
The application is made up of 4 modules which help process and present the book
The server part of the application is run in docker for development and deployment simplicity.
The project is using GitHub Actions as a CI pipeline
When developing Android application, to make the application maintainable and easy to read, the MVVM (Model View ViewModel) architecture was used.
To show a number of times character appeared in a book, two visualisations are used:
- Pie Chart
- Lollipop Chart
The character network allows to visualise connection between characters in the book.
This is an interactive visualisation, which allows user to define it's parameters.
When it comes to network itself, it can get a bit messy
Therefore by clicking a character, all their links will be highlighted.
When reading the book, location and characters will be highlighted in text, which can be clicked to view in which chapters they appear.
As a proposal for future visualisation, the following prototype was developed.
For the full dissertation please click the image below.
This project contains 3 main modules:
Each module contains README which documents how they can be run
Start coreNLP
docker pull romanpod/corenlp
docker run --name CoreNLP -p 9000:9000 romanpod/corenlp
Start MongoDB
docker run --name mongodb -d -p 27017:27017 \
-v $HOME/db:/data/db mongo --noscripting
To start the server
in Server/src/main/resources/server.properties set the following
# Core NLP
# coreNLP_url = coreNLP
coreNLP_port = 9000
# Mongo DB
# mongodbUrl = mongodb
mongodbPort = 27017
# Certificates
# certPath = /certificate/cert.jks
# certAlias = holmesCertificate
certPassword = OyBhf&A3F8p&Shz6Xvw3ePisaRMXvBII3Q1i@wawKLw!$4#I3uRVtPe0WGQLQbd#8NaxmdI%!k@NppKSeVsfpDKkuxTWkm9CMmM
# Local Testing
mongodbUrl = localhost
coreNLP_url = localhost
certAlias = holmesCertificateLocal
certPath = /certificate/certlocal.jks
Run the server from Intellij for ease
To run android app open Android studio and start an emulator