Making the Dictionary of the Frisian Language Available in the Dutch Historical Dictionary Portal

The main goal of the Wurdboek fan de Fryske Taal-Geïntegreerde TaalBank (WFT-GTB) project was to publish the monumental Dictionary of the Frisian Language (Wurdboek fan de Fryske Taal, WFT) in the CLARIN research infrastructure, according to open, CLARIN-compliant standards. This has been achieved by 1) curation of the dictionary data, resulting in a well-structured TEI-conformant encoding and 2) publication of the dictionary in the INT (Institute for the Dutch Language) dictionary portal, together with the main historical dictionaries of Dutch. The project was carried out by two CLARIN partners, the Fryske Akademy (FA) in Leeuwarden and the INL in Leiden.

The dictionary has been online for more than six years now and has served many users, assisting both researchers and general users interested in the Frisian language. In this paper we look back on the project and discuss the use of the dictionary application by analysing the retrieval application logs and by providing a use case, exemplifying how the dictionary can be used for historical lexicographical research. The paper concludes with some suggestions for the improvement and enhancement of the online version of the WFT.