The Software and the Complex Structure of the Computerised Lexicographical-Terminological Database in Foreign Languages for Special Purposes

The Computerised Lexicographical-Terminological Database (hence CLTD) was initiated as a subproject within the framework of a World Bank Project,namely "Catching up with (Western) European Higher Education Fund (CEF),Foreign Language Teaching Development Pogram,Hungary".The initial planning and application took place in the second half of 1993.The project itself was planned to be carried out in the years 1994 and 1995.Hiowever,for various reasons,the present version of the software was only developed in 1997.

The main idea of CLTD has been that the prospected users of our database,mainly the lecturers and students of our university need to have complex information,so our entries have a complex structure: the bilingual entries have both terminological and lexicographical data.

The overview of the software is the following:

After long deliberations we finally opted for an Intranet solution.

At the planning of the system we had the following main goals:

The ability to manage a large quantity of data
Platform independence on the clients` side
Easy maintainability
The use of open standards
Having these goals, we decided to develop an applicatiion based on today`s popular and well-understood Internet technologies.The data is stored on a Microsoft SQL Server.The base of the application is the integrated Web server of Windows NT Server supplemented by the Active Server Pages component of Internet Information Server 3.0,which provides server-side scripting features.Any up-to-date Web Browser can serve as a client.

After this short overview of the environment let us focus on the application itself.It is very important (and at the same time most problematic,tiresome and time consuming) to put already existing entry forms (in Word for Windows 2.0,6.0,7.0 format with different "internal" versions[1.1,1.12,1.3,1.5] ) into the database.There will be no difficulty with the new Web-style entry forms to be filled in in the future,as they are in direct connection with the SQL Server database.

As users belonging to a lot of different "categories" will access the system it has been necessary to ensure the protection of data against illegal use.Our considerations regarding this have been the following:

To protect one student`s(collector`s) work from other students
To provide the right of edting for authorised persons only,namely for the ESP teacher and for the specialst lecturer
To provide safe administration for users (regarding their own data) and for the "real" administrators of the database metadata.
All the users have to identify themselves by the login process.Then they can work within the framework of their allotted rights.We have tried to avoid the use of totally different entry forms.So he input,the corrections (by the collector) and the checking/correcting/editing by the ESP lecturer and the specialist lecturer,respectively, are made with the help of more or less similar entry forms.Entries can be made in ANY LANGUAGE PAIRS ( of course,this is true only for the languages already existing in the database).Drop-down list boxes are given everywhere where possible to make the collector`s/user`s work easier.So it is possible to choose from the items that are already present in the database or are given as preset lists.The collector`s/user`s personal data fields have to be filled in only once( a feature not present in the Word format form).

During queries we can search for ALL the ATTRIBUTES of EACH ENTRY WORD as that can be expected of an up-to-date system. The software is also capable to execute CONCORDANCE and COLLOCATION SEARCHES.

Besides the above-mentioned features our software has been designed to have the possibility to incorporate MULTIMEDIA,that is not only text but audio and visual information as well.