1 SHAWEL Sharable and Interactive Web-Lexicon Greg Gulrajani - Max-Planck-Institute in collaboration with David Harrison & Peter Wittenburg Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

2 Introduction paradigm of lexicon creation changes: > collaborators work at different locations > different knowledge and languages involved > lexicon is subject of continuous change Wish came up to test sharable and interactive lexicon: SHAWEL different lexical structures used in DOBES for purposes of study we chose a simple table-like lexicon Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

3 CELEX Paradigm Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Development DBs Production DBs developer team several sub DBs complex transfer and generation procedure users (read only) users could create temporary sub DBs

4 Goals extremely simple user interface - spreadsheet like look & feel therefore selection of a simple lexicon as example editing in a multi-user environment requiring consistency checks functioning across unstable Internet lines requiring transaction capability audit trail to keep overview about changes only few should be able to write, all should be able to read but reading only in limited chunks?? creation of accounts by the leading researcher participation of several teams, i.e. support for several lexica immediate context-based startup UNICODE support - input methods & writing systems should finally also work on unconnected Notebook Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

5 Design 1. Version Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Java Client web client Web server CGI script Database system currently a Java Thin Client (reading/writing/administration) download and launch with JNLP choice for a database system (roll-back mechanism, record locking, UNICODE - also searching & indexing access rights handling) 27 different keyboard layouts available others easy to add also writing systems (Bengali) web-client for reading by naïve users choice for ORACLE since most easy server

6 UI and Operation 1 Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics 1.launch SHAWEL and select lexicon (except started from context) structure is displayed (better show immediately some records)

7 UI and Operation 2 Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics 2. Issue global (or column) search and select input method 3 4 5

8 UI and Operation 3 Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics 3. Enter query string - result are hits 5 6

9 UI and Operation 4 Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics 4. Select modification - click on cell - select input method & edit 7 9 8

10 Experiences first tests by researchers bootstrapping by converting Excel into table multi-user functionality tested by the developers extensive test is missing UI easy enough - researchers seem to find it ok tabbed interface with more easy selection HTML interface tool ready to be used/tested ( Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

11 Perspectives how to go further? simple technical design issues: > replace CGI by Java Server Pages (better multi-user perf ) > extend protocol mechanism to SOAP (opening as service) add automatically updated author column local operation - but how to achieve synchronization? researcher bootstrap option (which formats / Shoebox?) extension to more complex structures (UI still simple? / CELEX) has this already been done in a satisfying manner? Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics ???