RFC 2229 (rfc2229) - Page 2 of 30

A Dictionary Server Protocol

RFC 2229              A Dictionary Server Protocol          October 1997


   3.7.    The STATUS Command ...................................   15
   3.8.    The HELP Command .....................................   15
   3.9.    The QUIT Command .....................................   16
   3.10.   The OPTION Command ...................................   16
   3.10.1. OPTION MIME ..........................................   16
   3.11.   The AUTH Command .....................................   18
   3.12.   The SASLAUTH Command .................................   18
   4.      Command Pipelining ...................................   20
   5.      URL Specification ....................................   20
   6.      Extensions ...........................................   22
   6.1.    Experimental Command Syntax ..........................   22
   6.2.    Experimental Commands and Pipelining .................   22
   7.      Summary of Response Codes ............................   23
   8.      Sample Conversations .................................   23
   8.1.    Sample 1 - HELP, DEFINE, and QUIT commands ...........   24
   8.2.    Sample 2 - SHOW commands, MATCH command ..............   25
   8.3.    Sample 3 - Server downtime ...........................   26
   8.4.    Sample 4 - Authentication ............................   26
   9.      Security Considerations ..............................   26
   10.     References ...........................................   27
   11.     Acknowledgements .....................................   29
   12.     Authors' Addresses ...................................   29
   13.     Full Copyright Statement .............................   30

1.  Introduction

   For many years, the Internet community has relied on the "webster"
   protocol for access to natural language definitions.  The webster
   protocol supports access to a single dictionary and (optionally) to a
   single thesaurus.  In recent years, the number of publicly available
   webster servers on the Internet has dramatically decreased.

   Fortunately, several freely-distributable dictionaries and lexicons
   have recently become available on the Internet.  However, these
   freely-distributable databases are not accessible via a uniform
   interface, and are not accessible from a single site.  They are often
   small and incomplete individually, but would collectively provide an
   interesting and useful database of English words.  Examples include
   the Jargon file [JARGON], the WordNet database [WORDNET], MICRA's
   version of the 1913 Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary
   [WEB1913], and the Free Online Dictionary of Computing [FOLDOC].
   Translating and non-English dictionaries are also becoming available
   (for example, the FOLDOC dictionary is being translated into
   Spanish).







Faith & Martin               Informational