IntroductionUp

We developed the PanLinx interface to provide access to our database for search engines. Human users, too, can use it, but it is not designed to be intuitive or efficient for them.

PanLinx exposes our data through hyperlinks. It uses no forms and no buttons. Its pages contain links of two kinds: range links and expression links. A range link is labeled with a range of strings, such as periodicdiffere … philippinetime. Each string is the degraded text of an expression, truncated if necessary to its first 15 characters. An expression link is labeled with the (undegraded) text of an expression, such as persfadyjny.

The PanLinx home page contains a few hundred range links. Each produces a group page with a few hundred links that partition the range of its calling range link. For example, the link periodicdiffere … philippinetime produces a page with links from periodicdiffere … periodicpotenti to philippin … philippinetime. Each of these group-level range links produces a subgroup page with a few hundred expression links, falling within the selected range. For example, the link phantom … phanungnguoc produces a page with expressions from ”Phantom” to “phản ứng ngược”. Each expression link produces an expression page, showing all the distance-1 translations of the expression.

All expressions in PanLex have expression pages, so a search engine can discover about 27 million pages by crawling PanLinx.

The dual partitioning is implemented so that each subgroup contains about the cube root of the total count of expressions and each group contains about the same count of subgroups. With the total of about 27 million expressions, each group and each subgroup contains about 300 elements.

All pages except the home page are generated on demand.

At the initial level, PanLinx displays a static page, on which the user chooses one group. At the group level, PanLinx displays a generated page, on which the user chooses a subgroup. At the subgroup level, PanLinx displays a generated page, on which the user chooses an expression. At the terminal level, PanLinx displays a generated page describing the expression, and in particular the expression’s text (lemma), its language variety, and the language varieties and texts of all direct translations of the expression that are found in PanLex.

Twice a week, a daemon refreshes the partition of the expressions into groups and subgroups and regenerates a file that constitutes the body of the PanLinx home page.