This is my first post in the forum, so I start by greeting everyone ! And thanks for the wonderful resources suttacentral has to offer. To simply introduce myself, I’m working in IT and I have some experience in various opensource projects (https://luxcorerender.org/, https://www.picochess.org/, http://gaiachess.free.fr/,..). I’m a beginner in Pali, but very interested in the Pali Canon since over 15 years.
I’m French, and Pali/French dictionaries are not as complete as English ones ; I assume that there are lots of people looking for a Pali dictionary in their mother language. Also, English resources are great (PTS/Cone/CPD/…) but I feel that there is no « structured » data and tool to improve English dictionaries.
So, here is the pharaonic project : building an international, participative, structured dictionary. To provide simple tools for lexicographers/volunteers, allowing them to work collaboratively (think wikipedia), and consolidating the work in a simple, public, and exportable database (allowing producing PDF, queryable website and API).
So the project is divided in three parts :
- A simple graphical user interface for non-IT lexicographers to work on the dictionary in a collaborative manner.
- A central database allowing querying and simple data export (JSON)
- Ready to use formatted data (PDF, website)
I already have working prototypes for the 3 parts :
- A proof of concept GUI (see attached screenshot), (will be free, opensource, multiplatform)
- A working MongoDB database (simple JSON storage)
- A working proof of concept PDF export (see attached PDF) from a tool I did some years ago
I plan to have a working « sandbox » infrastructure in 1-2 months, at the moment there are still important features missing (nicer GUI, versioning, etc.)
When the tool will be complete, I hope to create a ‘dictonary comitee’ to organize the methodology around the dictionary ; I already have plans for the « French committee » , but I hope there will be some international interest around this
On the collaborative part, a lot of work is common to all languages (selection of lemmas, grammatical classification, morphology, semantic relationships, etymology, etc.), and only some parts need specific work in each language (meanings, encyclopedic information). So I hope that there will be emulation and progress, even if target languages are different.
So I’m posting here for two reasons :
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The project is at a very early stage, so if you have some advice or you think some points should be improved, please let me know !
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One of the first things I have to do is to decide the structure of a dictionary entry ; I’m not a lexicographer, and here is my proposal (directly inspired from Lexicography). I attached a proposal for the entry structure (see entry_structure.PDF), and I’m looking for comments on this.
I’m not allowed to upload file attachements, so here are the links :
Screenshot : https://drive.infomaniak.com/app/share/256623/e1a31580-83c1-4f49-8571-de70daf8d31f
Entry structure : https://drive.infomaniak.com/app/share/256623/69205432-e06f-40e6-81d1-91e2045d1d1a
PDF export sample : https://drive.infomaniak.com/app/share/256623/51b0fdbb-3110-4cfa-937f-a2a20d051216