History of the App’s Development

Earliest phase

Our app has a long history of development that stretches back into the 1990s. It was originally conceived as the first CD-ROM multimedia project of the Diederichs-Verlag (which is also the publisher of the Wilhelm-Edition) together with the Data Becker-Verlag. However, the project was still ahead of its time; the thinking in terms of media projects hadn’t yet reached maturity. A few years earlier, Adrian Stahel had developed a data model for the Eranos Foundation, which we were able to adopt almost 1:1 in this new edition, as well as the ideas of many of the app’s features.

The years 2018-2020

Adrian Stahel started work alone with the Russian software development company Edison to develop an app prototype. Soon after, Amando Zanetti, the son of a friend, joined him and took on the task of digitizing the Wilhelm and Baynes works and transferring them into a database structure. Stahel knew that he needed additional digitization and technical expertise for a project of this scope, so he turned to the Sinology Department at the University of Zurich and its head, Prof. Wolfgang Behr. With wise foresight, Behr forwarded Stahel’s request to Arthur Fritzsche, then a student of Chinese studies, who had already distinguished himself on previous occasions as someone with an combined interest in China and information technology. Fritzsche transferred James Legge’s classic work into the database structure and soon coordinated the work of a larger group of students from the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich (see “Team” on this website).

Interface Design

Fritzsche saw the need for a more modern user interface design for the app, which was implemented soon thereafter. However, what was planned as a simple interface redesign from a black-and-white to a modern user interface turned out to be more complex than expected. Large parts of the program code had to be rewritten.

The digitization work

The transfer of the book texts into a fixed data structure serves the purpose of making it easier to access the crucial passages and to compare the commentaries with each other. Each work to be transferred is the responsibility of an editor who must be familiar with the structure of the Yi Jing texts. Fritzsche and Stahel helped the editors to identify correctly the book sections and add them to the database. A database tool specially adapted to the Yi Jing database structure is used for database entry. The editors are responsible for the accuracy of the works they have edited, even after publication.

The quality of the editors’ work was high. In particular, the digitization of P. Régis’ pioneering Latin work, as well as a Ukrainian translation of Wilhelm by Ilya Stepanov, and the Chinese Yi Jing commentary by Yang & Zhang by Shengrong Zhou were extensive projects.

Obtaining copyrights

Our library purposely contains various unusual works of particular interest to Yi Jing connoisseurs. On Stahel’s initiative, Fritzsche had the original text of what is probably the first Yi Jing work from the West, Jean-Baptiste Régis’s “Y-King,” a French Jesuit missionary, photographed and licensed by the Austrian National Library, after which the Latin text was recognized using OCR software and most of the errors were painstakingly corrected by the editors Nicolò Bernardi and later Caroline Stettler.

Cooperation with the software development company

The collaboration with the team of programmers from the Russian company Edison in Western Siberia was pleasant. For most of the time, two programmers worked on the development of the app, led by a confident Chief Technology Officer. Communication between us benefited from the company’s policy of sending its programmers to English courses paid for by the company, which enabled them to maintain a high level of language proficiency.

Towards the end of the development period, we also learned to communicate with the development team more often via Skype instead of handling almost everything in writing. Especially when writing comments and short messages in a hurry, many false assumptions and misunderstandings can arise, which can build up over the course of the communication. This is much less likely to happen in a verbal exchange, where it is easy to ask questions and follow up with further questions.

The intensity of the collaboration within our team is also evidenced by one figure: within two years, over 12,000 email messages were exchanged.

We are constantly striving to obtain further copyrights and to transfer a wide range of additional works.

— Arthur Fritzsche, July 20, 2020; revised on November 16, 2025 (translated by DeepL)