[Xerte] Re: Dictionary Web Service

[Fred Riley]

> I want to be able to do
> 
> http://some service.com?req=getdef&word=heteroscadastic
> 
> and have the definition of heteroscedastic retuned so I can present in
> my content.
> 
> Wikipedia do that?

Ok, I can see what you're after, Julian. Wikipedia can't do that, but Wiktionary might. It even has your very abstruse word "heteroscedastic". I can't see an API or a tool to return a simple definition from a URL, but you might be able to hack a scraper based on the following URL format:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wiktionary/en/wiki/<term>

For instance:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wiktionary/en/wiki/heteroscedastic

Of course, you'd then have to parse the returned data. However, this resource might fulfil your aim of a universal contributory glossary, and maybe there is an API buried away somewhere on the site. Worth a neb, anyway. 

Wordreference (http://www.wordreference.com/), which I mentioned before, has some 'client-side' functionality with Javascript 'bookmarklets' and mobile apps. Whilst primarily aimed at translation between language pairs, there's also an English-only dictionary, though it doesn't have "heteroscedastic" as it's a general-purpose effort. 

Wordnik (www.wordnik.com) looks to be a possible, as it has an API and a SDK, and has a definition for "heteroscedastic". It's also contributory. 

Let us know what you end up with - I'd definitely be interested, on account of my languages interests. Dictionary/thesaurus/concordancing apps for mobile devices would also be very useful to know about (and might give me the final push to get a smartphone). 

On a tangent, does anyone in languages on here know of a good online concordancer, or app/widget, that you can feed corpora in various languages to? 

Fred