The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland
General Information
- Organization
- The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland
- Developed by
- XWiki SAS
- Contact
- https://xwiki.com/en/company/contact-us/
- Website
- https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/
Usage
The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland (HLS) uses XWiki as the core platform to manage its editorial processes and multilingual content. To meet the project's complex requirements, 3 distinct workflows were developed to support the creation of articles, multimedia content, translations, and references, as well as the review, approval, and publication steps. XWiki handles the document structure through customized macros, while Jira is integrated to track the editorial workflow.
To streamline editing, the macros have been enhanced for inline editing within the WYSIWYG editor. This allows editors to work on multiple documents simultaneously and view them in their final layout context.
XWiki also supports a powerful search experience for users. Articles can be found using filters by theme, place, person, family, date, location, and lexicographical order. Users can search directly through input fields or refine results with facets. The same approach is applied to multimedia elements, with filters available by type, date, and location.
To ensure efficient multilingual search, a custom Solr indexer was implemented. This allows the platform to handle both language-dependent and language-independent metadata, making it easier to manage and retrieve content across all required languages, regardless of the data's complexity.
Description
The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland (HLS) stands as the most comprehensive encyclopedia dedicated to Swiss history. Its mission is to present contemporary historical research in a format accessible to a wide readership. The project is overseen by a foundation supported by the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (SAGW/ASSH) and the Swiss Historical Society (SGG-SHH), with funding provided through national research programs.
Comprising 36,500 articles authored by scholars and reviewed by subject-matter experts, the content is curated by an editorial team of around 20 professionals. The encyclopedia is produced concurrently in Switzerland’s four national languages: German, French, Italian, and partially in Romansh.
