Subject: dictionary editing system (was: Lojban dictionary in TEI)

From: Jay Kominek <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 2 May 2002 12:42:19 -0600 (MDT)

On Thu, 2 May 2002, Allan Bailey wrote:

> new db structure:
>
> word: [gismu/cmavo/fu'vla/...]
> english-gloss:
> esperanto-gloss:
> ...
> <rodbau>-gloss:
>
> place_structure:
> synonyms_related_words:
> rafsi:

I've attached a copy of the PostgreSQL tables I'd come up when working on
this.

A feature of particular note is that I separated out the entry for the
Lojban word (that information is contained in the words table), and the
content in the other language. Each row in the definitions table records
the language of the definition.

One also needs to record a keyword, or keywords for each place of brivla,
so that when you construct the <otherlanguage>->Lojban portion of the
dictionary, you can map words as appropriate.

Some of the design requirements I'd come up when working on jbovlaste:

* Users need to be presented with a semantic catagorization of the words,
whether or not the database stores it. (I was thinking a Wiki-esque
front end, which pulled definitions out of the database when indicated
by appropriate tags.)
* There definitately needs to be a way for users to associate
near-arbitrary HTML with everything, so that they can link to, if
nothing else, mailing list archives.
* Multilinguality of content. If you're going to implement this, you might
as well implement it so that it doesn't have to be redone for some other
language. (Supporting existing natlangs and close approximations thereof,
like Esperanto, is good enough.)
* A (threaded) comment system, so users could provide feedback on
definitions of words, and the suitability of words for mapping to
particular concepts.
* A voting system for words, with something mojo-esque to calculate whose
votes a worth more, etc.
* The database needs to be designed so that it is easy to not only search
for words in any language the database has content in, but also to dump
the contents of the database to a file easily. (For export to a PDF, and
thus, a printer. See http://miranda.org/~jkominek/dict_en.pdf for an
example of my prototype's output.)

I'm probably missing a lot.

- Jay Kominek <[email-masked]>
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose