Continuous Integration and Unit Testing of Digital Editions

Over the last few years, the Perseus Digital Library (PDL) and the Open Philology Project (OPP) have been moving towards enabling better interoperability and citability of their texts by implementing the Canonical Text Services URN standard and the Epidoc subset of the TEI P5 guidelines. This is a resource-intensive effort necessitating a scalable workflow centered on continuous curation of these texts, from both within and outside the PDL/OPP ecosystem. Key requirements for such a workflow are ease of maintenance and speed of deployment of texts for use by a wide variety of analytical services and user interfaces. Drawing on software engineering best practices, we have designed an architecture meant for continuous integration with customizable services that test individual files upon each contribution made to our public git repositories. The services can be configured to test and report status on a variety of checkpoints from schema compliance to CTS-ready markup designed for flexibility and interoperability.