Lexical problems in large distributed information systems

The lexical problems in large information systems are created by the necessity of handling a great number of names and their interrelations. Such lexical problems are not covered completely by the concept of data dictionaries, which are mostly concerned with database schema design rather than the execution of operations. In this paper we introduce our view of a lexical subsystem as a separate component in an information system architecture, to deal with linguistic and control functions concerning the lexical problems in local and network environments. The lexical subsystem is a special efficiently organized program package, which plays the role of a “linguistic filter” in a broad sense for lexically incorrect queries, promotes integration of databases and information retrieval systems, and facilitates the creation of local information systems. We hope that lexical subsystems can become productive for any large, especially distributed, information system.