crossTerm API v1

The crossTerm API v1 provides read access to local content of the terminology management database crossTerm.

crossTerm API v2 provides read/write access to local crossTerm content, enriched by various search possibilities. In contrast to v1, v2 requires to log in as a specific user and respects the rights of this user.

Terminology Management

• crossTerm is a terminology management system. In general, the advantages of creating and maintaining a terminology database are:
• Represent knowledge (of a specialized field, of a company, of an industry...)
• Make knowledge accessible
• Facilitate monolingual and multilingual specialized communication and translation
• Settle and promote standards with respect to terminology usage ("word choice"), for example, to forge a corporate identity by consistent wording.

crossTerm Contents

• The different levels and types of crossTerm contents are:
• Instances: These can be viewed as separate dictionaries with their own data model, represented by crossTerm data categories. Data Categories define the properties that contents of the instance might have.
• Entries: In the world of crossTerm, an entry represents a concept (any concrete or abstract thing or process)
  • Each entry belongs to exactly one crossTerm instance.
  • Entries can have meta data in the form of properties (instantiations of data categories) and attachments. Examples: Definition; Image (figure).
  • An entry typically holds a set of terms designating the concept.
• Terms: A term designates ("labels") a concept with a natural language string ("word") in one language.
  • Each term belongs to exactly one entry.
  • Terms can have meta data in the form of properties (instantiations of data categories) and attachments. Examples: Part of speech; Term type.
  • Each term has a language code.
  • Terms belonging to the same entry can be regarded as synonyms (if their language code is identical) or translation equivalents (if their language code is different).

This diagram shows how a crossTerm database is subdivided into instances, which hold entries that in turn may have one or more terms in different languages.

The following diagram illustrates how terms may be grouped into entries. Since "shoe lace" and "shoe string" in English both refer to the same concept, they are in the same entry. Similar, in German, there are also two terms referring to this concept ("Schnürband" and "Schnürsenkel"). The terms in different languages belonging to the same entry are translations of each other.

Help

As part of the installation the API documentation is deployed. This documentation is always up to date and describes the functionalities of the installed API.

You can open the documentation at the server with this default URL:

v6.3: http://localhost/Across/CrossTerm/Help

v7.0: http://localhost/Across/CrossTerm/