IntroductionUp
Assimilation is the work of consulting acquired sources to find and select useful data in them, to put those data into forms that comply with our standards, and to insert the results into the PanLex database.
Your strategies and methods for assimilation can vary greatly from one source to another. In fact, your skills are likely to make only some of the sources we have acquired practical for you to consult. For example:
- Some sources are practical only if you know a programming language and can parse text strings with regular expressions.
- Some sources are practical only if you aren’t a programmer, because they can be consulted only with detailed human editing.
- Some sources are practical only if you know how to enter text in a particular script (such as Arabic, Devanagari, or Han) with a keyboard.
- Some sources are practical only if you can understand a particular written language.
Details
The following pages describe in some detail how we do assimilation. Assimilation is most of what we do in PanLex, and it’s complicated. So there is a substantial amount of documentation.