Practice of Smart LSP Lexicography: The Case of a New Botanical Dictionary with Latvian as a Basic Language

The article provides an insight into the project “A New Botanical Dictionary: Terms in Latvian, Latin, English, Russian, and German” implemented in the second half of 2017 and in 2018 within the Ventspils University of Applied Sciences (VUAS) internal call for proposals “Development of Scientific Activity at the VUAS”. The VUAS Faculty of Translation Studies in collaboration with the Faculty of Information Technologies in their scientific and research work along with other Latvian universities aim to occupy a niche in the branch of applied linguistics, therefore the research is related to this discipline and offers solutions in practical lexicography. The study describes a new botanical dictionary (NBD) – a mobile application prototype – with Latvian as a basic language. An insight into the macrostructure of the dictionary and the structure of entries is given. The research deals with questions concerning IT solutions in general (simple) and semantic search in particular. It also introduces a general search – a morphological approach developed by the authors of the research specifically for the Latvian language; this approach is used to search for Latvian botanical terms in both singular and plural forms. The extracted and linked data methodology developed by the authors is described in detail, as well as the NBD technical solutions and architecture, technologies used, database model, and additional features.