DictGate is a platform for the exchange of lexicographic tools, data and documentation. It is part of the CLARIAH-AT, the Austrian umbrella for CLARIN and DARIAH activities. It is intended to support the build-up of a sustainable infrastructure for digitally working lexicographers.

Data

DictGate hosts a wide range of lexicographic data. Among others, we are working on a morphological database of contemporary German which is designed as an open lexicographical hub serving not only linguistic data on words, but also information gleaned from digitally available corpora.

DictGate aims at the creation of freely accessible lexicographic resources and supports the principle of Open Access. One of our particular interests are Near Eastern languages. Currently, DictGate provides access to some smaller dictionaries of vernacular Arabic. Among several other varieties, we collect data on the varieties of Cairo, Tunis, Rabat and Damascus. Most of this data was created as part of the VICAV project which is being conducted in cooperation with the Department of Oriental Studies of the University of Vienna.

Tools

To support the whole lifecyle of digital lexicographical data, a number of tools are required. Technically, DictGate is an instance of the corpus_shell framework which builds on the FCS/SRU protocol endorsed by the CLARIN-ERIC for federated content search and can be used as a RESTful web service.

Most of the data published so far has been produced making use of the Viennese Lexicographic Editor, a free tool which has been developed at the ICLTT over the past few years. The editor which basically supports any XML format is freely available.

Standards

One of our primary concerns is the application of digital standards and de-facto standards to our language resources. One focus has been the interoperability of lexicographic resources. In a number of cases we have been working on specialised schemata based on the TEI (P5) dictionary module, which has been our main means of encoding for lexicographic data. In all these endeavours we have aimed at a high degree of interoperability with the ISO standard LMF (Lexical Markup Framework). In projects aiming at cross-dictionary access we have also started to work with semantic technologies such as RDF and SKOS.