online knowledge base

MICRA, Inc. (http://humanities.uchicago.edu/homes/MICRA/) is working on a freely-available online knowledge base, which currently includes a marked-up version of Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (G&C Merriam Co., 1913, edited by Noah Porter), with over 100,000 headwords. It's still a work in progress: many of the pronunciations and Greek etymologies are missing, and it needs a lot of proof-reading, but it's a huge start. (It's the basis for a searchable dictionary at http://humanities.uchicago.edu/forms_unrest/webster.form.html, hosted by the University of Chicago's ARTFL Project.)

The marked-up text of the dictionary can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.uga.edu/pub/misc/webster. There are 24 files (generally one file per letter). Zipped, they total 11.4 Mb. Unzipped, I'd guess 35-40 Mb.

Now they're not in XML format, but they're close. I'd be willing to do the conversion, but I don't have the space to host the result. Does anyone want to volunteer some web space?

- -Michael Dyck jmdyck@netcom.ca