[Xerte] Re: Dictionary Web Service

[Fred Riley]

> Like I said, it sounds like one of those beautifully simple ideas that
> if no one else has done we ought to do. It would fit well with the
> whole xpert / open Nottingham agenda.

Perhaps, but it would be an enormous project to create a public 'glossary of everything'. There are tens of thousands of nouns in English alone, and many of them would have different definitions in different contexts (off the top of my head - silicon, logic, up, spin, chip). You'd need a massive database to store definitions and tags and relations. Not to mention the aggravation of contributors fighting over wording. Essentially, you'd be creating a new dictionary from scratch, but without the 'extra bits' and of relatively limited application compared to dictionaries.

Maybe an XPERT-style aggregation approach might be more productive, if you could find individual glossaries with APIs/feeds you could harvest. 

Worth a try, and a useful project I'm sure, but you might run into 'reinventing the wheel' criticism. 

Cheers

Fred