XML and General Dutch Dictionary (ANW)

Van der Kamp, Lexical databases and digital tools, april 29th, 2005, 1

Peter van der Kamp

www.inl.nl

kamp@inl.nl

Topics

• Characteristics

• Schema

• XML Dictionary Editor

• Problems to be solved

Van der Kamp, Lexical databases and digital tools, april 29th, 2005, 2

Characteristics

Online dictionary, no printed version

Dutch language (incl. Flanders) from 1970 - 2018

Based on a corpus of 100 mio words

Elaborated microstructure

XML

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Schema characteristics

• Divided into 12 subschemas

• Currently all elements: zero or more occurrences except headword

• Currently 186 atomic elements

• Many enumerations (378, to be used as controlled vocabulary)

• Some elements allowed at different levels

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Schema

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Entry

PoS Sense

Entry

PoS

XML Dictionary Editor

User requirements:

• Don’t want to work with tags

• Tags invisible

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XML Dictionary Editor (cont’d)

User requirements:

• Form like input• Use of predefined lists (controlled vocabulary)

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XML Dictionary Editor (cont’d)

User requirements:

• Insert, add and remove elements must be easy

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XML Dictionary Editor (cont’d)

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User requirements: • Hide/show elements

Technical requirements• Subschema enabled

XML Dictionary Editor (cont’d)

XML editor, but…

…which one?

XMLWriter

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XML Dictionary Editor (cont’d)

Currently the best possible solution:

Authentic (free XML content editor from Altova)

StyleVision (e-forms and stylesheet designer from Altova)

(http://www.altova.com)

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XML Dictionary Editor: problems

Problem: hide element = delete element

Hide element important due to size of entry

Solution (to be implemented):

• Extra element <hide> in schema

• Checkbox as ‘data entry device’

• When unchecked: perform hide

Disadvantage:

<hide> is noise in dictionary entry

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XML Dictionary Editor: problems

Problem: visualize difference between container elements and atomic elements.

Current implementation requires some schema knowledge

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Conclusion / future work

Developing forms easy

Current implementation satisfying

Database solution (relational vs. xml)

Retrieval

Easy use of (X)query language

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