Specialized Bilingual Dictionary for Technical Terms (BDIC) as Drupal 6.x Module

For the e-learning community www.mediencommunity.de targeting students and teachers in German media- and printer education Drupal service www.arlmedia.eu has developed a bilingual dictionary (BDIC) as Drupal 6.x module. This complex dictionary module (BDIC is short for Beuth-Dictionary) will be published as free opensource module. BDIC is sponsored for Drupal Community by Beuth-University (Beuth Hochschule) in Berlin, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research in Fermany (BMFB, Bundesministerium für Bildung and Forschung) and the European Social Funds (ESF). This Dictionary provides a teaching and dictionary infrastructure. BDIC is in use on a production system on www.mediencommunity.de/bdic.

BDIC provides these features:

1. Phonological search based on the soundex algorithm: even for typographical errors or inaccurate entries at least phonologically similar references will be displayed.
2. "AutoComplete" feature for entering the search is convenient and instructive
3. Role "Guest" can search the dictionary
4. Role "BDIC admin" can manage the dictionary and create new entries and semantic fields and see the user suggestions.
5. Role "BDIC teacher" can select and export his own word lists.
6. A list of "fields" (semantic hints) should be able to disambiguate identical lemmata (homonyms) or lexical translations.
7. Translations will be displayed as Drupal nodes. Comments allow community review for translations.
8. The bdic module interacts properly with Durpal Core (Content, content type, blocks, menus, etc)
9. BDIC is a standalone Module: It dioes not require any other modules than Drupal Core.

Special emphasis was put on scalability of the algorithm. With thousands of community members search algorithms have to safe processor load. A tiered phonological search has been optimized for that purpose.The phonological search is enabled only if no other matches are available.

BDIC is hosted on a test environment: http://beuth.arlmedia.com/bdic

Testers can register with BDIC using the testlogin given on the site. After registration they will have BDIC-admin rights and teachers rights.

A production implementation as a community Dictionary is provided on www.mediencommunity/bdic
A slideshow describing the BDIC concept is displayed on http://beuth.arlmedia.com/node/17282.
A scientific paper analysing the cntributions of bdic is given privided on http://beuth.arlmedia.com/node/17283.
BDIC is available for download on http://beuth.arlmedia.com