Invited talk: How to build a termbase for 500,000 users (and live to tell the story)

Abstract

In this paper, we showcase the Irish National Terminology Database focal.ie which was launched on-line in 2006 and immediately became very popular, attracting hundreds of thousands of searches every month, even though some of the content on it had already been available in other forms before. We believe this is because of its user-friendliness, a factor which was taken strongly into consideration during its design.

The web site was built to make the Terminology Committee’s stock of terms available online, but was designed to be as easy to use as Google, and to appear to the average user to be an online dictionary, rather than a term base. In this paper, we will talk about the web site’s search capabilities, its lexicographical front-end and terminological back-end, the way in which we have tracked the effectiveness of the service using statistics and user feedback, and how our approach has resulted in a large body of satisfied users.

About the authors

Michal Boleslav Mechura is a language technology consultant, working for Fiontar, Dublin City University as the principle software developer on the focal.ie and logainm.ie projects. His other professional activities include computational lexicography and issues of multilingual computing such as software internationalization and localization. He had previously worked for Microsoft Ireland as a localization engineer.

Brian Ó Raghallaigh is a lecturer at Fiontar, Dublin City University, lecturing in Irish and Linguistics. He is also currently involved in the technical support and development of the focal.ie and logainm.ie projects. He had previously worked on the Irish synthesis project abair.ie at Trinity College Dublin, where he is currently completing his dissertation on multidialect phonetisation for Irish.

Contact details Michal Boleslav Mechura Dublin City University, Fiontar michal.boleslav.mechura@dcu.ie Brian Ó Raghallaigh Dublin City University, Fiontar brian.oraghallaigh@dcu.ie