| This Service Genre accepts a term from a requester and provides a definition of that term. There MAY be more than one definition for a particular term. Dictionary services operate in the same natural language as the source term. A Dictionary is an organised collection of definitions and uses of terms. Dictionary Services MAY be constrained to offer definitions from specific domains. For example, a legal dictionary service offers legal definitions for words; such definitions MAY differ from those generated by other domain specific dictionaries. The genre does not specify the internals of the dictionary, such as the matching algorithms to use, the store for words and definitions, whether separate word-definition lists can be aggregated etc. Resources (collections of definitions) offer a “dictionary” interface, defined in the service expressions that specialise this service genre. Clients may send requests to this interface to discover definitions stored or managed by the resource. As defined, the dictionary service genre is not access controlled: i.e. any client may attempt to contact a dictionary service end point. The service end point for the resource is responsible for determining which results it will return and from which clients it will accept requests. |