Famulus · The semantic core
Famulus Elucidation.
What a sentence says, and on which evidence.
A critical edition explains a passage in a note: who is meant, where and when, what the sentence asserts and what it leaves open, and on which evidence each reading rests. Famulus Elucidation is the part of the platform that writes such notes for the sentences of a collection. Normalisation, hermeneutics, proof, logic, language and the data structure each contribute one layer; this page brings them together and leads to one page for each.
Gerd Graßhoff, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Forschungsinstitut des Deutschen Museums
Working state of October 2026. Papers and technical documents are drafts; the documentation sites are copies of the living platform documentation. Every number on this page is read from the workspaces when the page is built.
The goal
An elucidation beside the transcription
A reader of the Kármán Nachlass marks a phrase in the transcription. In the edition viewer the phrase offers one badge; opening it reads the whole sentence and shows its explication — the meaning, what it is about, each referent with its register identifier, the questions that stay open — and hands the sentence to the probe set. Beside it a Bedeutung view lays the normaliser's footnotes over the page as marks with their grounds, and a dossier turns the page into sourced facts of a person. The names of these surfaces are not fixed yet. 2 sentences have been read from the reader so far; the layers they draw on are described on the pages below.
What the reader sees
The workbench
Probe Lab
Where the reading is developed. A collection with a lab sidecar is chosen, then a probe. The explication of that sentence is shown at once, and the audit keeps to the few factors that decide it. Learning compares a candidate with the package rules on the probe set, which grows when a review verdict is marked. 2 collections have a lab sidecar; 1 expectations come from such verdicts.
The probe lab
Layer one
Normalisation
The first stage of understanding. Every expression of a sentence is read as what it stands for: a register person, a place, a day, the writer or the addressee, an earlier person taken up by a pronoun. Each reading is a footnote with its grade and grounds. In the Kármán lab copy 2,270 sentences carry 6,556 footnotes.
Normalisation
Layer two
Hermeneutics
Reading a sentence against the world of its source. Specialists answer what the text presupposes — a calendar date, a position in the sky as the tables of the time gave it — and an explication states the sentence's meaning, its referents and what the page does not settle.
Hermeneutics
Layer three
Proof
From a question to a justified answer. The evidence space narrows the objects of a collection by their attributes; an argument takes addressed facts as premises, and a conclusion is accepted only when it follows from them.
Proof
Layer four
Logic
What follows from what. The Famulus Normal Form writes a sentence as literals over atoms so that entailment and opposition between the propositions two sentences express can be decided by joins in DuckDB; a test bench measures classifiers of these relations.
Logic
Layer five
Language
The rules of use. LWgrammar holds 528 term entries and 127 usage rules in its reference store, and a dictionary for each collection built from the corpus itself. The reader's dictionary tab already uses it.
Language
Foundation
Data
Every layer reads and writes DuckDB files next to a collection: the Stanza analysis, the fact sidecar, the sentence record, the dictionary, and one global register of 13,081 persons, 2,892 places and 6,357 institutions.
Data
How the parts become one
One home
The layers grew in parallel workspaces. famulus-proof becomes their single home: famulus-logic and famulus-normalisation are merged into it, and one documentation site replaces five.
Improvements are made in general terms only: declared attributes, rules and instructions that a learning loop may revise and frozen probes may refute. A fix that names a case is not accepted.
Famulus Proof documentationMap of the workspaces