Tokens are stored in a database for easy access by unix tools like grep and awk. Each token has associated with it a reference to the source identifier in the TEI encoded corpus. Thus a user can look back to the contexts of a curious token which resulted from a query on the database for specific frequency occurrences. The implementation combines the features of document collection and corpus analysis into one interface. The still limited front end is programmed in Java-augmented CGI to enable maximum portability.
Users can browse through documents, list tokens and observe their contexts.
Some simple querying capabilities are also available. Unfortunately, the project has been limited by the still nascent state of accessible TEI and SGML resources. The Snapshot project is an ongoing development effort. More research is required to evaluate the current design and implementation and to explore alternative data encodings. In addition, more work can be done to explore encoding of non-textual data and with a more distributed system where documents are not actually stored on the host machine.