Hooking up to the corpus: the Viennese Lexicographic Editor’s corpus interface

The paper addresses the issue of interfacing between digital corpora and a new dictionary writing application being developed at the ICLTT (Institute of Corpus Linguistics and Text Technology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences). It deals with issues of dictionary creation, software design, usability and interoperability in relation to the example of this fairly new piece of software, the Viennese Lexicographic Editor. In addition, it outlines the ICLTT’s projects which are using the new tool and explains the role of these undertakings as part of the ICLTT’s involvement in the Austrian CLARIN-AT initiative. The focus of the discussion will be on the implementation of efficient workflows designed to streamline the transfer of corpus examples stemming from distributed online corpora into dictionary entries. An important additional topic is the access mode of digital corpora available on the internet and the issue of service-oriented software design. As a last point, we will also touch on the important issue of standards and de-facto standards used in these projects.