[Xerte] Re: Dictionary Web Service

[Julian Tenney]

Rather than build an academic glossary of all words, it would be great to hit a web service and get definitions of words back. It needs to handle things like 'heteroscedastic' or other more arcane concepts. Ideally you'd also be able to contribute definitions as well, so if 'heteroscedastic' wasn't in the service, you could add it, or could add an alternative definition.

When I did my degree, my most thumbed book was 'The Collins Dictionary of Economics', because there were lots of words I hadn't seen before.

It struck me that this is useful in all sorts of content, and there ought to be one 'best of' service rather than everyone all creating their own glossary functionality. If everyone contributed a few definitions in each subject area, soon we'd have a really good resource that developers could draw on and contribute to when creating interactive content.

If there isn't one, this is one of those beautifully simple ideas that we should take forward ourselves, but it's also one of those beautifully simple ideas that someone ought to have thought of already...

It would fit well with xpert.

J

-----Original Message-----
From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Fred Riley
Sent: 02 February 2011 11:46
To: Xerte discussion list
Subject: [Xerte] Re: Dictionary Web Service

> Does anyone know of or use a decent dictionary / glossary web service
> that I can get or post words to and get definitions back?

Are you looking for a service which you can use to generate, say, popups/tooltips above marked words? Are you looking for English or for other languages? You might the following of interest:

www.wordreference.com - multilingual dictionary with downloadable browser and smartphone widgets
http://www.wordnik.com/
http://www.onelook.com/
http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/

Those are starters for ten - I could likely help more if I know what your specs are. I used to work in languages...

Fred

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This email represents my own personal views and is not at all reflective of policy or opinions at my institution. So there. 
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