Dansk begrebsordbog: baggrund og metode

Abstract

A Danish thesaurus project is currently underway at the Society for
Danish Language and Literature in Copenhagen. Funded by The
Carlsberg Foundation, the project runs 2010-2013 with a staff of
two full-time editors. It does not start from scratch but draws on
already existing lexical data: main input for the thesaurus will be
the semantic descriptions of The Danish Dictionary (DDO, 116,000
senses) and the Danish WordNet (DanNet, 65,000 synsets), the latter
resource itself built on DDO data. Following an initial analysis
of existing thesauri, a macro-structure was adopted close to the one
used by Franz Dornseiff: Der deutsche Wortschatz nach Sachgruppen
(2004). As a side benefit, this choice makes it easier for the editors to
utilize the contents of the only existing thesaurus for Danish, Harry
Andersen’s Dansk Begrebsordbog (1945), which itself is no less structurally
dependent on the first edition of Dornseiff (1934). One methodological
aspect is given particular attention: what should be the
main ordering principle within an entry? A final decision has yet to be
taken as it is primarily a problem of presentation with no immediate
bearing on the editing process, but eventually a conclusion must be
reached as the thesaurus is going to appear as a print dictionary, too.