How can the the usability of a central CLARIN application, like the Federated Content Search, and specifically the FCS for Lexical Resources (LexFCS), be improved? What suggestions and requests do lexicographic experts have? What do our targeted user groups actually need? Who exactly are our targeted user groups?
The Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig, which operates a B centre as part of the German CLARIN-D and Text+ consortia, held a half-day workshop to address these questions in June 2025. In order to further develop the LexFCS platform and make it more attractive and accessible to the scientific community, ten experts from seven German scientific institutions with wide-ranging lexicographical and lexicological expertise were invited.
In the joint discussion, priorities for the future development of the LexFCS were determined. They can be grouped into three main clusters
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Improved transparency,
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Required functionality,
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Portfolio development and community building,
which are summarized briefly in the following:
Improved Transparency
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The user interface should manage user expectations by providing more information directly in the search UI and by providing an improved integrated documentation or help section.
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The integrated documentation should guide users more actively through the application and should be oriented towards specific research questions.
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Usage must be made more transparent, especially with regard to available resources and the performed search process. This includes comprehensive information on type and thematic scope of every resource as well as clear information about any errors that may have occurred in the search process or changes in the interpretation of queries by endpoints.
Required Functionality
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Supporting users in query formulation is important in order to facilitate the search process, e.g. through a visual query builder. This can also be used to demonstrate the capabilities of the query language and the available resources.
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Metadata should be harmonised and integrated into the FCS based on existing metadata platforms. This allows resources to be complemented with important descriptive information and enables the use of additional selection filters.
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Links within and between dictionaries, as well as links to other types of FCS resources (like text corpora), should be given stronger consideration and support.
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The FCS specification should be further refined with regard to the operators to be used and their specific semantics (exact search/precision-first vs. fuzzy search/recall-first strategies). Common guidelines and best practices documents should be provided with regard to their concrete support in the endpoints. If necessary, the behaviour of existing endpoints should be adapted to these guidelines.
Portfolio development and community building
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Qualitative development: Resources that are already available must be further consolidated at the existing endpoints. This applies in particular to increased support of the respective microstructures (annotation layers / lexical fields) of a resource. Regular checks of the provided metadata is essential to ensure that it is always correct and up to date.
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Quantitative development: The integration of new resources is of great importance for the relevance and attractiveness of the FCS. Scientific committees can provide particular support here by identifying missing relevant resources whose integration should be prioritised.
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Community building: The LexFCS must be promoted more strongly among the identified target groups. Possible means of building a community include organising or participating in relevant events that may focus on usage, the provision of own resources, or the further development of the platform (workshops, hackathons, etc.).
A more complete summary of the achieved results can be found in a dedicated report (Zenodo, in German language).
In the meantime, a second workshop on the topic has been held at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language Mannheim, and a third workshop is planned for early 2026 at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Initial adjustments have already been made to the FCS web interface, which will soon be available to the public.