ELDIT is an ongoing language learning project in which recent language methods and technologies are used to implement innovative didactic ideas.

The basic architecture of ELDIT is a client-server model making use of standard Internet and WWW protocols. The server is implemented using Java Servlet technology, and runs on any Web Server that supports the Java Servlet API.  Java Servlet technology is a powerful and easy-to-use technology for the dynamic creation of HTML pages.  On the client side, the dictionary can be accessed by any Web-Browser.  The current version of ELDIT supports Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, and Opera.

As a uniform data and knowledge representation formalism, we use the XML language. XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is a meta-markup language that allows the definition of specific tag sets that break a document into parts. Such tag sets are defined in a so-called document type definition (DTD), and specify the structure of an XML document or data set. Since an XML tag set explicitly describes the different parts of a document, XML documents can easily be shared and reused among different applications. Further advantages are the clear separation of content, structure, and presentation, ease of use, and the free availability of many XML tools and utilities.

When a user retrieves a particular dictionary entry, the client sends a request to the server. The corresponding data is searched for in the ELDIT database, and an HTML-page is generated according to specific personal learning situations. This approach allows great flexibility, since presentation and organization of the content elements change in different learning situations according to linguistic and didactic demands. 

For more in-depth information on the technological issues of the ELDIT research project, we refer you to our scientific publications, more information on linguistic and didactic issues can also be found on the web site.

last update 7.6.2005