Open Access

Peter Meyer

• This contribution outlines a conceptual analysis of the dictionary-internal cross-reference structure in electronic dictionaries along the lines of Wiegand’s actional-theoretical text theory of print dictionaries. The discussion focuses on issues of XML-based data modeling, using the monolingual German online dictionary elexiko as a running example. The first part of the article demonstrates how Wiegand’s formal theory of mediostructure and its intricate nomenclature can be extended in a systematic and lexicographically justified way to cover the structure of the underlying lexicographical database of online dictionaries. The second part of the article applies the concepts developed to a more technical question, examining the extent to which cross-reference information can be stored and processed separately from the dictionary entry documents, e.g., in a relational database. The results are largely negative; in most real world cases, this leads to an unwanted duplication of XML-related structural information. The concluding third part briefly describes the strategy chosen for elexiko: mediostructural information is not externalized at all; cross-reference consistency checks are performed by a dictionary editing tool that takes advantage of a specialized XML database index and can easily be made more efficient and scalable by using a simple caching technique.