[Xerte] Re: Dictionary Web Service

[Paul Swanson]

Wiktionary does have an API: http://en.wiktionary.org/w/api.php

Lots of output options, including xml, xmlfm (default), json, php, ...

> -----Original Message-----
> From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [mailto:xerte-
> bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Fred Riley
> Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2011 9:39 AM
> To: Xerte discussion list
> Subject: [Xerte] Re: Dictionary Web Service
> 
> > 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
>