Wörterbuchnetz

The Trier dictionary network offers access to more than 40 dictionaries and reference works, which can either be called up individually or queried together using a comprehensive search. At the same time, the dictionaries are interlinked at keyword level so that iterative navigation within the dictionary network is possible.

The resources brought together in the dictionary network are fed from two types of data sources. On the one hand, these are dictionaries that have been created through the retro-digitisation projects carried out at the TCDH (including the German Dictionary by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm). On the other hand, dictionaries created at other locations are integrated in such a way that their keyword lists can be queried via the dictionary network database and are directly linked to the external publications.

Digital reference works, like their printed counterparts, are related to each other in many ways and are thus implicitly "networked" to a certain extent; however, due to the differences in the layout, arrangement and structure of the individual works, a comprehensive, integrated search is not readily possible in the digital medium either. Reference works, however, which are divided into standardised and thus comparable information units by means of content-structural markup and enriched by metadata, make the implicit networks explicit. This enables a new quality of information retrieval to be achieved and closes the gap between the cumbersome usability and limited availability of book versions on the one hand and the lack of systematisation and arbitrariness of information in conventional Internet search engines on the other.

The dictionary network links both the TCDH's own resources and dictionaries published by other institutions. It also offers the possibility of being accessed from external electronic documents. Each user can query the persistent address of the relevant article and integrate it into their own electronic text, for example to link the reference to a dictionary article directly to the resource on the TCDH server. In addition to this interactive individual linking, the complete keyword lists and hit lists for searches carried out are also made available with the associated addresses in order to realise comprehensive networking between an external dictionary installation and the resources in the dictionary network. There are already links from the German Legal Dictionary, the Dictionary of the German Winegrowers' Language into the dictionary network and also from Wikipedia.