WWW/Internet - Portal do Software Público Brasileiro

ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISThe web is the ideal platform for various types of activities involving terminology (Nuopponen, 1996). Agreat number of dictionaries and encyclopedias in different languages and targeted to a wide variety of userscan be found on Internet (Nuopponen, 1996; Nuopponen, 2000). One example is the multilingual dictionaryfor technical terms related to astronomy, developed by International Academy of Astronautics (Matsukata etal., 2002). Another example, related to Geoinformatics area, provides users a greater participation andinteraction allowing them to add suggestions and comments on dictionary entries. Such suggestions andcomments are visible to all users and can stimulate discussion and influence linguistic decisions of thoseresponsible for dictionary maintaining (Jachimski, 2004). The OpenDict, a multilingual dictionary based onwiki technology for e-learning, allows users to directly add and edit entries in the dictionary, and thedictionary’s administrator can assesses these changes and can accept or reject them (Szedmina et al., 2005).The possibility of use of hypermedia content, the rich interactivity due to its non-linear navigation'sstructure, and the power to make information widely accessible makes web the ideal media to builddictionary. Furthermore, with the web it is possible to do frequent updates and immediate publications ofinformation, unthinkable for other types of media. Moreover, the high connectivity that eliminates distancesand establishes a virtual communication offers high productivity through collaborative methods of virtualwork, essential for building the dictionary.There are many efforts destined to promote access to information for general and scientific purpose, asWikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/) and Science Across the World (http://www.scienceacross.org/). Amultilingual dictionary for terminology of polymers easily accessible represents another effort.3. DEVELOPMENT OF THE DICTIONARYThe system development process is iterative and incremental. The following activities were undertaken in theproject development: (1) elicitation and analysis of requirements; (2) definition of conceptual model andarchitecture of the system; (3) development of prototypes to validate the requirements; (4) definition of thetechnologies to be used; (5) implementation of the system; (6) deployment of the system.The main use cases of the application domain are: (1) Register a term – registration of a term standardizedby IUPAC; (2) Register a translator – registration of a collaborator as the translator for a specific language;(3) Translate a term – translation of a term and its definition from English to another language; (4) Searchterms: search for terms and definitions in dictionary. The system has the following actors: (1) Administrator,responsible for include terms and definitions approved by IUPAC in the dictionary and register on the systemthe collaborators responsible for translations, (2) Translator, that represents collaborators that will make thetranslation of terms and definitions (3) End-user, that represents the community of system end-users,comprised of students, teachers, researchers and others that will use the dictionary.An important requirement is the implementation of access control of users to database, as illustrated inFigure 1. Only the Administrator user has total access to the database where standardized terms are stored.The Translator user has writing’s access only to the specific database of language which he is the responsibletranslator, while the End-user can perform just read-only queries in database.Figure 1. Database control accessThe adoption of free tools and technologies was made as an implementation strategy to reducedevelopment and maintenance costs. Thus, the LAMP platform (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP),widespread and consolidated for web systems, was used. Linux is an open source operating system robustand appropriate for systems that require high performance and reliability. Apache (http://httpd.apache.org/) is394