[KS] RESOURCE>New Edition of Online CJK Dictionaries

Charles Muller acmuller at human.toyogakuen-u.ac.jp
Mon Mar 5 07:04:15 EST 2001


Colleagues:

I am happy--I should say--ecstatic, to be able to announce the release of
the all new Unicode-XML version of the online Dictionary of East Asian
Literary Terms (DEALT) and Digital Dictionary of Buddhism (DDB) . It is by
far the most significant advance in these works since their original
placement on the Internet, for a number of reasons.

** Content -- The amount of compound words included in the DEALT (in
addition to the basic 20,902 single Unicode characters), has been increased
to 6,000. The coverage of the DDB has been upped to over 8,000 terms (there
were 4,000 two years ago). With the amount of data we have ready for input,
this number will increase rapidly in the coming years.

** Technical -- More important, however, are the technological advancements
made in this new version. Working now directly off of the canonical XML file
set, a new XML-Unicode (utf-8) search engine has been incorporated, by means
of which users may now directly paste in terms right from their desktops and
search. [Note: There are a few conditions related to the developmental
nature of  this search engine, regarding which USERS MUST READ the
Introduction and Search Help files, listed below. MOST IMPORTANTLY, if
search generates a white screen, just hit your refresh button, and it will
usually work the second time.]

** Addition of Comprehensive Index File -- This development enhances the
usefulness of the DDB dramatically. If the term that one is searching for
does not turn up in the standard dictionary search, the system will search
for the term in a large composite index of East Asian Buddhist
works--presently including over 290,000 entries. So if the term you seek is
not in the DDB, you will more than likely be able to find what dictionary,
and on what page, it *is* located.

** Although the basic organizing language for the DDB is classical Chinese,
those not trained in this language may still make extensive use of this
resource via the various indexes. For example, I would imagine that our
romanized Sanskrit terms index has to be by far the largest of its kind
available on the Web.

** Please note that the main table of contents pages for both works are
developed throughout with absolute, rather than relative, hyperlinks. This
means that you may save this page to your desktop, and have ready access to
the dictionaries and other resources listed there whenever you have an
internet connection present.

I would, at this time, like to offer my deepest thanks to Dr. Michael Beddow
(retired from the University of Leeds), who, has thoroughly, painstakingly,
and unselfishly offered his abilities to create this new XML version. At
this point in time, there is very little in the way of standard, ready-made,
software support to develop the XSL, XLinking, and CJK-Unicode search engine
that is capable of parsing out mixed CJK/latin script encoded in UTF-8
format. Michael, has, in one fell swoop, not only created a valuable
advancement for Asian Studies and Buddhist Studies, but has opened up a
whole new arena of possibilities for the use of XML and Unicode in all kinds
of textual research projects. We owe him much gratitude.

Since there was considerable doubt regarding the ability of our staff at
Toyo Gakuen to offer the technical support to keep Michael's system up and
running, we have, for the time being, set it all up at commercial web
hosting service, under my domain name.

As always, let me reiterate the point that both dictionary-databases are
intended to be collaborative in nature. If you have single terms or a
glossary that you would like to include, you may be certain that you will be
well credited, both at the level of individual entries, and in the front
matter.

As with previous versions, those whose platforms do not support Unicode with
Unicode-mapped fonts will find some limitations to using this resource.

Reports of technical problems and data errors are welcomed.

URLs:

DDB/DEALT Gateway: http://www.acmuller.net
DDB Main Page: http://www.acmuller.net/ddb/index.html
DEALT Main Page: http://www.acmuller.net/dealt/index.html
DDB Intro: http://www.acmuller.net/ddb/ddb-intro.htm
DEALT Intro: http://www.acmuller.net/dealt/dealt-intro.htm
Comprehensive Index: http://www.acmuller.net/ddb/allindex-intro.htm
Search Help: http://www.acmuller.net/ddb/ddb-search-help.html

Regards,

Charles Muller
Toyo Gakuen University

Resources for East Asian Language and Thought
http://www.human.toyogakuen-u.ac.jp/~acmuller
<acmuller at human.toyogakuen-u.ac.jp>





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