A Dictionary Server Protocol
For many years, the Internet community has relied on the “webster” protocol for access to natural language definitions. The webster protocol supports access to a single dictionary and (optionally) to a single thesaurus. In recent years, the number of publicly available webster servers on the Internet has dramatically decreased.
Fortunately, several freely-distributable dictionaries and lexicons have recently become available on the Internet. However, these freely-distributable databases are not accessible via a uniform interface, and are not accessible from a single site. They are often small and incomplete individually, but would collectively provide an interesting and useful database of English words. Examples include the Jargon file [JARGON], the WordNet database [WORDNET], MICRA’s version of the 1913 Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary [WEB1913], and the Free Online Dictionary of Computing [FOLDOC]. Translating and non-English dictionaries are also becoming available (for example, the FOLDOC dictionary is being translated into Spanish).
