Temporal data in lexicographic databases

The paper describes an approach to design of the Lexicographic Knowledge Base (LKB), which aims to fulfill two interrelated tasks: ($i$) goal-oriented development of linguistic typologies; and ($ii$) creation and updating of electronic bilingual dictionaries based on the developed typologies. In the LKB, some of the fields assigned by lexicographers to represent new knowledge on words' meanings (concepts) and translations are temporal. The content of these fields is time-dependent because lexicographers can change description of concepts with time. These changes may involve not only changes to existing concepts and appropriate fields with their descriptions (definitions), but also the changes to structure of individual dictionary entries of a bilingual dictionary. One of the LKB's goals is to provide a method to describe these changes consistently. Although the LKB's initial design relies on the existing structure of dictionary entries, this structure may evolve along with the appropriate concepts as the underlying linguistic typologies and dictionary entries evolve with time. The goal of this paper is to describe the temporal structure of a dictionary entry and the approach to design of the LKB with temporal data that will be able to fulfill both of the specified tasks. The proposed approach is illustrated by an example of the temporal dictionary entry structure of a German–Russian dictionary.