The Kármán papers are open for alpha viewing
The correspondence of Theodore von Kármán can now be opened in the archive viewer and read letter by letter. This is an alpha view: it is open for you to look at and try.
Critical annotation is not part of it yet. It is expected shortly. Until then, please treat what you see as a first look.
Kármán archive
The Kármán viewer explains the passage you select
Select a phrase in a transcribed letter, and a third column opens beside the page. It explains the passage in its letter and its series: what its names, places and references stand for, and on which evidence each statement rests.
This is an alpha view. A passage is read when you ask for it and kept from then on, so the next reader sees the same explanation. The name of this surface is not settled yet.
Kármán archive
References become sourced facts in a dossier
18 241 dossiers
Hand in a reference, a page, a passage or a letter, and Famulus turns it into facts in the dossier of a person, a place or an institution. Each fact names its page, paragraph and passage, and says who vouches for it: the person themselves or someone else.
The Kármán papers now have 18 241 dossiers with 40 070 facts, some of them matched against authorised authority files such as Wikidata. They are proposals: a fact counts only once the owner of the collection has confirmed it. Confirmed so far: 1.
Kármán archive
Every figure on a page gets its own citable address
508 figures with an address
Portraits, drawings, timelines and diagrams become items of their own, with an fr: address such as fr:collection/doc/page/fig01, the cut-out image and its printed caption. A description written by a model may help to find a figure, but it never becomes its title or part of the searchable text.
The first 2 collections carry 508 figures: a brochure on the Kármán context and Hartmann's sundial drawings. Every one of these addresses resolves in the shared library.
Documentation
Your data, at the protection level you choose
3 security levels
Famulus runs as a distributed, private network in the EU. Every connection between its parts is end-to-end encrypted.
Each collection works at one of three security levels, from EU services under contract, through our own private network, to strict local enclosure, where data never leaves the institution's own machine. The owner decides the level, access is by explicit grant, and a collection can be withdrawn again. These are design properties, not a certification.
Documentation Guide
Editions and archives open from one entry point
19 editions and archives registered
The landing pages lead into the editions: Kepler, Brahe, Euler, Copernicus, Kármán, the Babylonian Diaries, Bischoff's manuscripts, the sundials, Wittgenstein and mechanics, and the Tractatus typescripts. 13 landing pages are public.
Each card opens an edition viewer or a Famulus notebook. Unpublished material, such as Hevelius and publication drafts, stays inside the private network.
PDAI Editions Landings
Notebooks cite their sources by `fr:` address
19 chapters in the handbook
A Famulus Notebook is a working document in which you ask a question and see the answer, its sources and its checks side by side. The new chapter on citing shows how an answer names its source as fr:collection/doc/page/segment.
Before an answer is accepted, every address in it is looked up in the collection. An address that leads nowhere is flagged as a citation without a source.
Famulus Notebook Documentation
Every page and passage gets a permanent address
5 collections with permanent addresses
In a Famulus reference collection every document, page, segment and sentence has an fr: address, a citation built only from recorded bibliography, a record of where it came from and a validation record.
An AI assistant that asks for grounding receives the address, the citation and the grade of evidence with each hit. Where data is missing the citation says so; a gap is never filled.
Documentation Specification
One shared library for all collections, now in use
3 collections in the shared library
All collections are to live in one shared library, so a search, a notebook or an assistant reaches each of them in the same way. Libraries and catalogues can harvest the same holdings through standard interfaces, and institutions can federate them without giving up control.
The library is in use: 3 collections are in it so far. The other collections move over step by step, with the owner's approval.
Documentation
Bring your own collection: eight steps from folder to citable collection
8 steps from folder to collection
A folder of scans, PDFs and descriptions becomes a citable collection in eight steps: inventory, profile, structure draft, segment plan, review, build, collection database and the shared library. Nothing goes on before a person has signed off the review.
The chart shows which steps exist today for the first collections. An empty circle is a step still to do. Brahe's tables are becoming citable segments; the tablet edition of the Astronomical Diaries has a structure of its own.
Brahe Opera omnia Astronomical Diaries
Sentences get a normal form, with its reasons
5 evidence grades per mark
Names, places, dates and references of a sentence become nested marks. The larger the phrase, the deeper its line. A mark carries its normal form and a grade from sure to open, and a hover shows every reason behind it.
The card is live in the Kármán archive. Next comes the annotation tab of the ai-viewer reader: the shared card is prepared, but the reader does not show it yet.
Kármán archive
The probe lab tests normalisation on real letters
200 pilot sentences
A probe sentence goes through three steps: normalise, filter, classify. Variants can be compared side by side, and what is learned is recorded. The pilot draws 200 of 1271 sentences from 84 Kármán letters.
Context is flexible: the series of letters often settles a vague phrase. Context beyond the text stays marked as background and ungrounded, and an inquiry may try to ground it. Each revision of a normal form is stored with its reason.
Kármán archive
How reliably does the logic check work? We measure it
16 measurements so far
A test set of 703 planted sentences and hard counter-examples asks whether a checker names the exact logical relation between two sentences, even inside texts of up to 663 972 sentences. The best checker so far scores 0.84 on a scale where 1 is perfect.
A cascade of cheaper checkers has not caught up yet. The comparison is still running, and the strength grades of the normal form are not frozen.
The dictionary gives a term its sense from context
129 Kepler terms in the finding dictionary
The dictionary lists each term with senses that depend on author, work and period, each attested at a place in the corpus, and with usage rules that can be revised or withdrawn. The Kepler dictionary holds 129 terms and 14 phrases.
A rule fixes how a finding is located: the printed page first, the sheet of the scan beside it. Each decision of an author on a revision is recorded; it confirms a rule, contests it or reveals a gap.
Kepler Gesammelte Werke lwgrammar-evaluation
Famulus News by mail
Famulus News can now be subscribed to. Enter your address in the box at the foot of this page. A mail asks you to confirm, and only then are you on the list.
The mail carries only the link to the new issue in your language, with one link per news item. Every mail has a link to unsubscribe.
A guide for every reader
53 documents in the guide
The guide gathers the generated documentation and sorts it by who is reading: general information, the scholar who works with the editions, the scientist who builds on the method, and the system administrator.
Each part opens with a short path of three documents to start with. The language of each document is shown, because some manuals are written in German.
Guide Famulus