Interoperability of an 18th century Italian-Latin-Croatian dictionary

The digitization process of historical texts is increasing in the last several decades, thereby developing the field of digital humanities. However, the digitization projects are usually isolated to the project teams, universities and institutes, but also to individuals developing the project. There was a lack of communication between the community members, which resulted in resources, tools and systems that are not able to exchange information. Consequently, recently it was demonstrated that there is a demand for standardization of technologies, but also of all processes of development. Interoperability emerges as the key concept at this phase of digital humanities, which aims to facilitate communication of data. To enable semantic interoperability of historical dictionaries, they have to be encoded using some standard. In this paper we present the encoding of della Bella’s trilingual 18th century dictionary entries using a TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) encoding scheme for dictionaries. The dictionary is a trilingual dictionary containing Italian, Latin and Croatian language.