Re: [lojban] Technical, Help Request: What information *should* a Lojban dictionary system have?

[Alan Post <alanpost@sunflowerriver.org>]

On Sun, Sep 12, 2010 at 08:27:20AM -0700, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 07:22:19PM -0600, Alan Post wrote:
> > I've realized working on these programs that each one of them uses
> > a different copy of the dictionary.  That strikes me,
> > architecturally, as a problem.  I'd really like these programs to
> > be drawing from the same data source: the dictionary does change,
> > and even if we imagine the community dictionary never changing,
> > *I'm* not currently happy with it and want to make changes to my
> > local copy.
> > 
> > I have longer term plans to add to the corpus of Lojban-using
> > programs, and very much support defining a data format that
> > supports the use cases we put it to.
> 
> Yes, *exactly*.  So the question is, what would such a thing look
> like?
> 

I did not, last night, have anything firm to contribute to the
conversation, so I outlined my problem without having anything solid
to propose.

I don't have a firm idea yet of exactly what is being proposed, what
problem it is trying to solve, and what problem it isn't trying to
solve--I don't have enough context to really follow the e-mail
discussion and integrate ideas as I've seen them.

I've created a wiki page that I hope captures the essence of everything
that has been discussed so far:

  http://lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Dictionary

I would be helped by formalizing all of these ideas into actionable
proposals, and I think the best way to do this is to summarize
discussion into formal, structured proposals on the wiki.  The page
above is my start at doing that.

My contribution after sleeping on it is to ask: Our experience with
dictionaries all come from languages without formal grammars.  We have
a formal grammar.  Is the way we're thinking about a dictionary limited
by our experience of languages without formal grammars?  Can we do
something combining definitions and grammar that can't be done in
any other language?

I don't have an answer yet, I've added it to the page above and hope
other people will replace questions with proposals on that page as
we discuss them here.

-Alan
-- 
ko djuno fi le do sevzi

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