A bilingual dictionary with Semantic Mediawiki: The language Saliba's case

The language Saliba is spoken approximately by 200 indigenous in the Departments of Casanare, Arauca and Vichada, in Colombia, although the total population of this culture is around 2200 people. The Saliba language is considered a severely endangered language because most of speaker people is over 60 years old. This paper presents the ongoing work of the indigenous languages team at Caro and Cuervo Institute in developing Saliba electronic dictionary in order to revitalize this language. This work consists in creating not only an electronic dictionary, but also a space where linguistic and cultural information is stored about the language; for example, location on a map in the web of the indigenous reserves in Colombia, a grammatical sketch, personal names and toponyms, among others. We have been working with the information collected by Hortensia Estrada during 90s; written texts, recordings, drawings. Our work consists in showing all of this information of a friendly manner in the web. In order to do this, we have had to create templates for placing the information, format the written texts files into the appropriate way, improve the quality of the drawings, and segment the recordings. Furthermore, we have created learning material for Saliba indigenous children. The main software that we have used to create the dictionary is MediaWiki (free software open source) and various kinds of extensions such as: Semantic Mediawiki, Mp3Handler, GoogleMaps, among others. The Mediawiki software, adapted to lexicography needs, has become in an important tool in this project. All of these tools have enabled us to show and recover information from each lexicographic entry. Additionally, we have exported the databases of this dictionary to create smart device applications. This work was socialized and made available for Saliba communities. Indigenous Salibas were taught in the management of these tools in order that this work continues by themselves