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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.
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