Cross-references

A cross-reference consists of:

• an implicit source, i.e., the object from which the link is created,
• a target which can be an identifier or a list of identifiers (LUs or GPMUs according to the source identifier),
• a type specifying the name of the relation established between the identifiers,
• an information on possible reversibility of the link,
• the name of the reverse link when it exists.

Generic links are proposed to the dictionary designer to be used at his/her convenience for expressing relations between LUs on the one hand, and GPMUs on the other hand.

These two cross-reference systems are clearly distinguished although they possess similar features:

• lu-cross-references allowing to relate LUs.
• gpmu-cross-references allowing to relate GMPUs. CGPMUs and GPMUs are not differenciated in cross-references. They are considered as similar.

In the core linguistic architecture, cross-references from or to individual blocks of features are not advocated because no really convincing evidence of their use has been produced. However, experimentation of the standard on a large number of entries may prove a special kind of cross-references to be of use between GPMUs and syntactic blocks when more than one syntactic block is attached to the same LU. In this case, specific sets of cross-references should be created and clearly identified in order to control possible side-effects especially when exploiting cross-references for extractions and export.