🚀 go-pugleaf

There's clearly a need for a public domain online dictionary system
and there are already a lot of such things available on various
ftp sites etc.... Most of them are word lists, some of the contain
part-of-speech or other information as well.

Before we start compiling yet another one, we should sit back and
consider an encoding scheme which is flexible enough to meet a wide
variety of needs and applications. It's also a good idea to think
about a possible way to expand such an encoding scheme for applications
we don't even have an idea about now.

In the last few months I've collected all sorts of dictionary material
from virtually all over the world. This stuff was used then to create
an experimental lexicon which currently has more than 384000 entries,
mostly english words. Many entries have part-of-speech information
and data from a so called psycholinguistic database included.
Yet there are some more files to be processed. My problem about
this lexicon is, that it's already too large for my processing
capabilities (== hard disk storage space).

I'm very interested in a `public lexicon project' and I'm willing
to share the material that I've accumulated. I'm especially interested
in an encoding scheme, powerfull enough to meet whatever the needs
of interested users are.
- Such an encoding scheme would/should possibly be based on SGML.

Any comments/ideas?

p.s. Douglas Adam's Hitchhikers Guide could be a nice metaphor
     for such a project.
p.p.s: what about comp.text.lexicon ?

best wishes, Gerhard Gonter

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Gerhard Gonter                                 <GONTER@AWIWUW11.BITNET>
Tel: +43/1/31336/4578                   <gonter@awiwuw11.wu-wien.ac.at>
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