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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