VLE – Viennese Lexicographic Editor

VLE is an experimental piece of software that first came into existence as a by-product of a collaborative glossary editing project carried out as part of university language courses at the University of Vienna. As the tool proved to be flexible and adaptable enough, it was later also put to work in other projects. The interface is built around an XML editor. The communication between the dictionary client and the server has been implemented as a RESTful web service.

The editor allows to process standard-based lexicographic and terminological data, basically any XML-based format such as LMF, TBX, RDF, or TEI can be handled. Recent configurations of the program have been geared towards lexical data encoded in accordance with TEI (Ext Encoding Initiative). The program provides a number of useful functionalities to ease editing of lexical data. It can check the structural integrity (well-formedness) of input on the fly. Technologically, it draws not only on the XML core specification but also on several cognate technologies. XSLT and XPath play an important role both for visualizing and modifying existing datasets. One of the most recent improvements is versioning and an improved working mode that allows lexicographers to work on the XML data without actually seeing the tags. Furthermore, the editor also has a configurable interface enabling lexicographers to access external corpora and to integrate example sentences from them into dictionary entries. The communication between the dictionary client and the server has been implemented as a RESTful web service. Recent versions of VLE work with BaseX as backend solution.

Among others, VLE has been used in the VICAV, TUNICO and TUNOCENT projects.