O&A Database – Techniques of Digital Heraldry

Prototyping a New Look for the O&A

As part of my ongoing efforts to prototype possible changes to the College of Arms website, I’ve applied a related set of stylistic changes to my local mirror of the SCA’s armorial database.

Under the hood, this site is running a fork of the main O&A codebase (along with a custom local configuration file), so the core functionality is the same, but a number of changes have been made to the user interface throughout.

Site-Wide Visual StylE

The most obvious changes are to the overall appearance of the site.

There’s a site-wide header and footer that provide a bit of visual branding that matches the SCA’s main heraldry website.
There’s a row of navigation links in the header that allows quick access to each of the main search functions.
The text is set in a sans-serif font that is easier for some people to read, matching the readability prototype I made for the College website.
There’s some initial work done to make the site more usable on mobile devices with small screens, although this has not been tested thoroughly.

Supporting Pages

The list of “Related Web Pages” has been moved from the bottom of the home page to a separate “About” screen and expanded with more links, including direct access to the various search hints pages.
A new set of “search code lookup” pages allow users to find category headings and feature codes without scrolling through my.cat, and to find record types and kingdom codes without scrolling through the database format documentation. The category and feature codes both offer a “type to search” capability to make it easier to find relevant entries.

Display Options

On the search forms, the display options are presented in a more compact manner. Optional items which can be turned on or off are shown as checkboxes rather than select menus.

Other Tweaks

When displaying search results, the database copyright statement is only shown when requesting more than the default search limit.

O&A Search for Unregistered OSCAR Submissions

Here’s a nifty trick for the folks who might be running their own O&A server — which is admittedly a very, very small audience.

The OSCAR software can generate a supplementary data file in the same format as oanda.db which contains the names and armory currently in-process on LoIs which have not yet made it to an LoAR.

A Techie’s Guide to the Ordinary & Armorial

I ran a session about the SCA’s O&A database at the Virtual Known World Heraldic and Scribal Symposium this January, and am now belatedly getting a copy of my presentation posted here.

Descriptions for Field Division Directions

Following the 2021 rules change, SENA A5F1b now says that that changing the direction of partition lines is considered a Substantial Change, as is the difference between divided and undivided fields.

As a result, when using the Complex Search form to do conflict checking for fielded armory, we can add a second line for the field that matches anything with a similar direction. Continue reading “Descriptions for Field Division Directions”

A Roadmap to Morsulus’s Monthly Updates

Last year I wrote up a summary of Morsulus’s process for applying updates from the monthly LoARs to the Society’s O&A database, and then more recently I put together a high-level visual overview of the context in which the Morsulus herald does his work.

More recently, I thought it might be useful to use a similar visual style to summarize the monthly update process, as a way of giving people a graphical roadmap to the data flow before they dive into the step-by-step technical nitty-gritty. Continue reading “A Roadmap to Morsulus’s Monthly Updates”

A Roadmap to the World of Morsulus

Because the tasks performed by the Morsulus Herald mostly take place behind the scenes, even experienced members of the College can be a little vague about what’s involved, so I put together a high-level conceptual diagram that outlines how some of the main elements are related. Continue reading “A Roadmap to the World of Morsulus”

Updating the O-and-A Category Files

On December 14, 2020, Master Herveus d’Ormonde led a few interested heralds through an online session in which we were able to observe a portion of his workflow as Morsulus Herald, watching as he added several new cross-references to the armorial category files and published the changes to the public O&A web site.

I am attaching my notes from this session below in hopes that they might be of interest to other members of the community, although this is admittedly a fairly-obscure topic with a limited audience. Continue reading “Updating the O-and-A Category Files”

Building the O-and-A Search from Source

In a recent post, I described how to install the software that drives the College of Arms’ Ordinary and Armorial on your own web site, but if you’re interested in modifying that software, you’ll need to be able to build it from source.

The O&A web search software is bundled into an open-source package named Morsulus-tools, along with the utilities that are used to manage and update the database. Continue reading “Building the O-and-A Search from Source”

Unusual Weights for the O&A Complex Search

When using the complex search form in the SCA’s online ordinary & armorial, each line of the search is typically coded with a weight of 1, and most people never change this value, but setting these weights to other values do allow for some interesting search techniques.

A while ago, I asked on SCA Heraldry Unofficial Chat about how how different folks used these weight fields, and have summarized that discussion below.

Weight values are limited to non-negative integers, and may optionally be prefixed with a “+” or “&” character. Continue reading “Unusual Weights for the O&A Complex Search”

Updating the O-and-A Database

On July 25, 2020, Master Herveus d’Ormonde led a few interested heralds through an online session in which we were able to observe core portions of his workflow as Morsulus Herald, watching as he applied the changes from a recent LoAR to the O&A master database and published the changes to the public O&A web site.