The SIMPLE Database Editor
The SIMPLE Database Editor was created to accomodate the needs of two different kinds of users.

The SIMPLE Database Editor was financed by The Department of Scandinavian Studies and Comparative Literature (INL) - University of Oslo, and created by Preben Wik (main developer) and Lars Nygaard at "The Text Laboratory".

Current status: A database structure has been created, and the Sgml-files containing the complete Danish SIMPLE-lexicon has been parsed and placed in the database. Norwegian word translations and examples have inherited the Danish semantic information, and links between the two languages have been created. Links from the semantic information encoded in SIMPLE to existing language resources have also been created through the online Norwegian Bokmål lexicon definitions. The Norwegian SemUs are currently being manually inspected for errors and language specific differences. Work is under way to incorporate the Swedish SIMPLE-lexicon, and to link the SemUs in the three languages together. This could be used as a starting point in building a machine-readable online Scandinavian semantic lexicon.

What is SIMPLE?
SIMPLE Stands for "Semantic Information for Multifunctional Plurilingual LExica" and is a follow-up of the PAROLE project (Preparatory Action for Linguistic Resources Organisation for Language Engineering) - a European Union Language Engineering Programme. The aim of the project is to develop a harmonised common model for encoding structured semantic information. This may be useful for the Semantic Web, and in many information processing tasks such as Machine Translation (MT), Information Retrival (IR), and Cumputer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). Semantic lexicons of about 10.000 word meanings have been encoded in 12 European languages using the SIMPLE model, and now one for the Norwegian language - Bokmål is under construction as well.

- For more information on the Norwegian project and the SIMPLE Database Editor, please contact lars.nygaard (at) ilf.uio.no