[Lexicog] More on database design

[Claire Bowern]

Sorry for the delay in responding to this.

I wasn't thinking in particular about one data model over another, just
about how certain aspects of the database are implemented.

What I was thinking of in particular was a structure that allows each
addition of information later on in a way that's easy to do quickly and
consistently. One thing I really like about Shoebox (and one of the main
reasons I continue to use it) is the ease of entering data. Several of
the xml-based database structures use drop-down menus or require
multiple mouse gestures to create an entry. This really slows down data
entry. Another issue is changing the db structure as more is known about
the language. In shoebox of course it's easy to add fields later on, but
there's no easy way to add fields to all records of a database if the
existing records have inconsistent field ordering. And because it's easy
to add fields and data to Shoebox records, it's very easy to do it
inconsistently.

Another issue that's come up for me in working on group dictionary
projects is keeping track of who has edited what entry. There are source
and reference fields in Shoebox, so we know who made the initial entry
and where the example sentences come from, but other information in the
dictionary is proving harder to track. e.g. if someone changes the
spelling of an entry and adds their initials to the source, or if they
add or change a scientific name, or a regional language gloss. We have
housekeeping fields for this sort of thing, but people haven't, by and
large, been putting notes in them (e.g. speaker X rejected Y as a good
Dhuwala translation of this yan-nhangu word). This has meant a lot of
extra checking that might not otherwise have been needed, and this is an
issue when there are only 6 good speakers with finite energy and other
things to occupy their time.

Some decisions too have big implications for database structures. E.g.
having subentries in the database versus independent headwords -
changing subentries to new lemmas is easy later on, going back the other
way is a lot of work.

Claire

--- Mike Maxwell <maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu> wrote:

  Claire Bowern wrote:
>
> > Coming up with a good database structure early on is really
important
> > (I've learnt this the hard way, several times actually!)
>

> I can't speak for others on this list, but personally I'd like to hear
> more about that.  When I worked on SIL's LinguaLinks (and later on the
> model for FieldWorks), one thing we noticed was that we had considerable
> trouble coming up with a good data model.





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