Since 1986, the IAA Multilingual Terminology Database Committee and its successor StudyGroups on IAA Multilingual Space Dictionary, the first of which Groups was born in 2001 due to thefundamental change of IAA's organizational structure, have been making a continued effort to develop amultilingual dictionary of space-related terms. The first output visible to the general public was a lexiconpublished in floppy-disk form in 1996. This version was named The IAA Multilingual Space Dictionary,Version 1.1 in 1997, after some corrections were made to the 1996 version. It covered 2614 English terms for14 languages (an English term having multiple different meanings in astronautics is assigned with multipleID numbers, meaning that the selection is "definition"-based). In the version V.1.2, which followed V.1.1in 1998, the number of the languages was increased to 16. The CD-ROM version of V.1.2 was distributedfree of charge at the 2nd World Space Congress in Houston. In 2002, the dictionary was computerized byusing a database server and some recent Internet technologies, resulting in 2003 in the installation of theV.1.2A, in which the number of the terms was increased to 2628. The database is accessible from all overthe world via the Internet for searching the terms. The database system is flexible in adding new terms andlanguages very easily. It has been used to develop the version V.2.1 and the present version V.3.0. The V.3.0covers 20 languages for over 3,500 terms, although, except for the completed 5 languages, the newly added900 or so terms remain to be translated yet. In this paper, the status and some details of the multilingualdatabase-system for the Dictionary are presented. The protocol to conduct the continuous development ofthe Dictionary is proposed. The database-system will be able to provide an efficient means for developing afuture version of the Dictionary with definitions. Whether such an IAA's multilingual space dictionary couldbe compiled successfully, however, will depend not so much on the database-system protocol itself as on howa group and system of people who make or collect the definitions, can be organized.
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