The logical structure of Swahili-Polish dictionary entries and its XML implementation

Abstract

The present paper elaborates on the concept of a Swahili-Polish student dictionary outlined in Wojtowicz (2005)' and lays the foundation for encoding it in XML. A dictionary encoded in this way is easy to expand and can be kept up-to-date at a cost much smaller than that of a new publication. The fact that it will be encoded in XML — a versatile and universal format for text data and a de facto standard for electronic publishing — will facilitate automatic generation of various other formats (HTML, LaTeX, DICT) without forcing any decisions as to the final shape of the dictionary, while at the same time making it possible to maintain the source as a humanreadable database. The multitude of freely available XML tools makes the task of format conversion and data presentation trivial.

Keywords

• logical structure
• Swahili dictionaries
• Swahili lexicography