In December 1997, Logos -- a global translation company based in
Modena, Italy - decided to put on the web for free the linguistic tools
used by its translators, for the internet community to be able to use
them as well. The linguistic tools were the Logos Dictionary, a
multilingual dictionary with 7 billion words in fall 1998; the Logos
Wordtheque, a multilingual library with 328 billion words extracted
from translated novels, technical manuals, and other texts; the Logos
Linguistic Resources, a database of 553 glossaries; and the Logos
Universal Conjugator, a database for verbs in 17 languages. In 2007,
the Logos Library (formerly Wordtheque) included 710 billion words,
Linguistic Resources included 1,215 glossaries, and the Universal
Conjugator (formerly Conjugation of Verbs) included verbs in 36
languages.
1998 > The online database of the first volume (1751) of the
Encyclopédie
In 1998, the database of the first volume of the Encyclopédie (1751)
was available online, as an experimental project from ARTFL (American
and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language), a common
project of the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique -
National Scientific Research Center) in France and the University of
Chicago in Illinois (United States). This online experiment was a first
step towards a full online version of the first edition (1751-1772) of
the Encyclopédie by Diderot and d'Alembert, with 72,000 articles
written by more than 140 contributors - including Voltaire, Rousseau,
Marmontel, d'Holbach, Turgot, and others -, 17 volumes of text (with
20,736,912 words and 18,000 pages) and 11 volumes of plates. Designed
to collect and disseminate the entire knowledge of the time, the
Encyclopédie was a reflection of the intellectual and social currents
of the time, called the Age of Enlightenment, and contributed to
disseminate novel ideas that would inspire the French Revolution in
1789.