Experience of design and development of a new open access interactive multifunctional database management system for special lexis of biology

Abstract

Terminology work requires a lot of data processing in the practical research of comparative linguistics, especially when studying linguistic and terminological changes over time. The lack of appropriate wide-usage electronic tools and databases can slow down such research. Thus, an efficient information management solution is necessary to improve the efficiency of terminology and comparative linguistic research. Since 2021, a team of terminologists, translators, researchers, and information system developers worked together for two years, during which the open access interactive multifunctional database management system (IMDS) was designed and developed for data storage and a wide range of statistical and search options, especially for language research purposes and comparative multilingual studies in linguistics and terminology. The information system consists of multiple modules (input, statistics, export, etc.). The data input module was successfully designed and developed and has been used effectively by researchers for entering and collecting special lexis units. The article mainly describes the statistical data that can be obtained from the IMDS, as well as problems encountered during the development of the system. The IMDS data collection has been updated with 50,846 entries of scientific (Latin) organism names, 60,585 entries of local names of different organisms (mainly in Latvian, but also in other languages), 1427 entries of names of organism-caused diseases, 2942 entries of dictionary words and 313 entries of terms with definitions collected based on excerpts from different publications containing common names linked with their scientific names.