medialatinitas.eu. Towards Shallow Integration of Lexical, Textual and Encyclopaedic Resources for Latin

Authors: Krzysztof Nowak, Bruno Bon

Abstract:
medialatinitas.eu is a lightweight web application which integrates dictionaries, corpora and encyclopaedic resources for Latin. The integration takes places principally on the level of the user-friendly interface, so no explicit links between resources are provided. The main objectives of medialatinitas.eu are: improving access to distributed data; challenging separation of linguistic and encyclopaedic information in lexicographic description; compensating for deficiencies of existing lexicographic resources; building a community of users who apply computational methods in their study of Latin texts.
As for the architecture, medialatinitas.eu is implemented as a mashup application: the user’s query (as of now, only lemma search is supported) is processed and despatched to both local and distant services (RESTful APIs, SPARQL endpoints); the results are subsequently returned and displayed on the main page as a set of separate widgets. The widgets may contain short concordance lines and tables, but special attention has been given to alternative ways of content presentation, namely charts and visualisations. The widgets are provided with rich graphical hints and hold together thanks to such narrative devices as interpretative notes or explicative commentary. As a whole the widgets contribute to extensive description of Latin lemmas according to their grammatical, semantic and cultural properties.

Keywords: lexicographic mashup; data reuse and integration; visualisation; dictionary-corpus interface; Medieval Latin

Reference: In Kosem, I., Jakubiček, M., Kallas, J., Krek, S. (eds.) Electronic lexicography in the 21st century: linking lexical data in the digital age. Proceedings of the eLex 2015 conference, 11-13 August 2015, Herstmonceux Castle, United Kingdom. Ljubljana/Brighton: Trojina, Institute for Applied Slovene Studies/Lexical Computing Ltd., pp. 152-169.

URL: https://elex.link/elex2015/proceedings/eLex_2015_10_Nowak+Bon.pdf

Published: 2015