NZSL project: technical issues

Data:

The data for the NZSL dictionary - images and text - is stored in a database. It will be possible to get this data into unix files for this project. One part of the database contains the images of the signs and lots of text information about each sign. The other part contains English words along with their various senses and synonyms for each word sense.

The database has a relatively simple relational structure, but there are two interesting features:

There is not a simple one-to-one relationship between NZSL signs and English words - as in any pair of languages, the same English word (used in a particular sense) may correspond to several signs and the same NZSL sign may correspond to several words. Furthermore, an English word or an NZSL sign may be used in several different senses.
The NZSL signs are described in the database using the HamNoSys notation. In fact, the entries in the physical dictionary are sorted by their HamNoSys strings (well, it is almost this simple). For the third kind of search above (searching by sign), the HamNoSys encoding will be essential.

Implementation

There are probably many ways of implementing an online NZSL Dictionary. My guess is that a web based interface to a MySQL database is the most sensible.

Other Participants

There are three other groups who have an interest/involvement in this project:

Deaf Studies Unit: Graeme Kennedy, David McKee, Rachel McKee - the experts on NZSL and the dictionary. They are very supportive of the idea of this project.
NZ Deaf Association: Sponsored the development of the dictionary and have part ownership of the data. They have not been approached about this project yet. We will not make any of the data accessible outside of VUW until they have seen a prototype of the project and have given their approval.
Dave Moskovitz: the technical expert behind the database used for the dictionary. Dave is currently the Technical Director at The Web (a successful company downtown). Dave is very supportive of the project.