alLidd

alLidd is a modular, open-source framework designed to store, interlink, and query multilingual lexical data and related knowledge. It supports cross-language information retrieval, lexicography, and language-technology development by providing a shared data model and contributor tooling. The data model is graph-based: concepts, terms, languages, senses, and relations form nodes and edges; each language term can attach definitions, examples, and part-of-speech information, and translations map to related concepts across languages. Provenance and licensing are integral for governance and attribution.

Architecture and operation are centered on a graph store, a reasoning layer for lightweight inferences, and APIs that include REST and GraphQL. Data ingesters, or connectors, pull data from lexicons, corpora, and dictionaries, while the user interface supports editing, review workflows, and visualization. A modular plugin system enables integration with natural language processing pipelines, multilingual search, and machine translation tools. The project emphasizes interoperability through standard-like schemas and careful documentation of data provenance.

History and development trace the project to a collaboration among linguists, computer scientists, and open-data advocates that began in 2019. The first public release appeared in 2020, with subsequent major updates expanding multilingual coverage and data-curation tooling. By the mid-2020s, alLidd had contributions from dozens of institutions and language communities, and it continued to evolve through community governance and open-source collaboration.

Applications and impact include use in digital lexicography, language-learning platforms, NLP research pipelines, and multilingual search interfaces. It supports cross-lingual disambiguation, sense alignment, transliteration workflows, and data provenance tracking. Limitations discussed in practice center on data quality, licensing variation, and interoperability with existing standards and ecosystems. Related topics include lexical databases, linked data, RDF, and Wikidata.