Hi Eric,

Given the likely need to map back from an alternate name (string search in
the definition?) to the auth name (maybe the most common use for such a
service?), I think this route might be on the inefficient side.

I've been wondering about names as handles, with a crossref-like middleman
piece.  But not doing anything about such ideas.

-t

On Mon, 31 Mar 2008, Eric Lease Morgan wrote:

>
> Over the weekend I had fun with the DICT protocol, a DICT server, a
> DICT client, and the creation of dictionaries for the afore mentioned.
>
> The DICT protocol seems to be a simple client/server protocol for
> searching remote content and returning "definitions" of the query.
> [1] I was initially drawn to the protocol for its content.
> Specifically, I wanted a dictionary because I thought it would be
> useful in a "next generation" library catalog application. The server
> was trivial to install because it is available via yum. Since it is
> protocol there are a number of clients and libraries available.
> There's also bunches o' data to be had, albeit a bit dated. Some of
> it includes: 1913 dictionary, version 2.0 of WordNet, the CIA World
> Fact Book (2000), Moby's Thesaurus, a gazetteer, and quite a number
> of English to other dictionaries.
>
> What's interesting is the DICT protocol data is not limited to
> "dictionaries" as the Fact Book exemplifies. The data really only has
> two fields: headword (key), and note (definition). After thinking
> about it, I thought authority lists would be a pretty good candidate
> for DICT. The headword would be the term, and the definition would be
> the See From and See Also listings.
>
> Off on an adventure, I downloaded subject authorities from FRED. [2]
> I used a shell script to loop through my data (subjects2dictd,
> attached) which employed XSLT to parse the MARCXML
> (subjects2dict.xsl, attached) and then ran various dict* utilities.
> The end result is a "dictionary" query-able with your favorite DICT
> client. From a Linux shell, try:
>
> dict -h 208.81.177.118 -d subjects -s substring blues
>
> While I think this is pretty kewl, I wonder whether or not DICT is
> the correct approach. Maybe I should use a more robust, full-text
> indexer for this problem? After all, DICT servers only look at the
> headword when searching, not the definitions. On the other hand DICT
> was *pretty* easy to get up an running, and authority lists are a
> type of dictionary.
>
> [1] http://www.dict.org
> [2] http://www.ibiblio.org/fred2.0/authorities/
>
> --
> Eric Lease Morgan
> University Libraries of Notre Dame
>