Digital Lexica, Terminological Databases and Encyclopaedias: Contents, Structures and Formats

The workshop is divided in two separate blocks.

Block 1

We will start the workshop with a closer look at monolingual traditional Lexicography, i.e. printed dictionaries. To do this, we will analyse several well-known monolingual lexica. We will restrict ourselves to English dictionaries but also regard e.g. French, German, Russian dictionaries. Participants of the workshop are encouraged to contribute own material for extending this set of languages. The second type of traditional dictionaries we look at are bilingual dictionaries. These reference books list words from one language and provide possible translation. These two traditional types of dictionaries can be represented in XML according to the “Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange” (TEI). The TEI defines a dictionaries module and describes its usage in the documentation (Ch. 9 "Dictionaries"). 

Suggested reading:  A Gentle Introduction to XML (P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange, http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/SG.html ).

Block 2

The second block addresses: Semasiology and onomasiology - Terminological databases - Lexical Markup Framework (LMF). In addition to these dictionary-centred approaches, this block also addresses the possibilities to represent traditional encyclopaedias (e.g. Encyclopaedia Britannica) and new encyclopaedias (esp. Wikipedia) in a uniform way that allows the comparison of encyclopaedic information from different languages and/or different periods of time.