Optimot


Optimot, linguistic inquiries, is a service provided by the Directorate - General of Linguistic Policy of the Catalan Government in collaboration with the Institute for Catalan Studies and the Terminology Center TERMCAT. It consists of a search engine for linguistic information that helps to clarify doubts about the Catalan language. With Optimot different sources can be checked at the same time in an integrated way. When the search options provided by Optimot do not manage to answer the linguistic question, a personalized inquiry service can be accessed.

History

Up to 2007, the Consortium for Linguistic Normalization, the TERMCAT Terminology Centre, the Institute of Catalan Studies, and the directorate-general of Linguistics Politics dealt with linguistic inquiries that came from general population, companies, organizations, and language professionals. In order to avoid decentralization of the linguistic enquiries and to offer a unified service, Optimot was implemented. The search engine started working in October 2007 and the personalized service began in February 2008. Mainly, Optimot was to improve quality in linguistic-inquiry service by unifying criteria, and to promote linguistic autonomy.

Search sources

The sources used in the searches performed by Optimot are the following:
; They are the conjugation models from the Grammar of the Catalan Language by The Institute for Catalan Studies with the general forms and the main dialectal variants and with the full conjugation of the simple and compound times.
  • ; TERMCAT Terminological Dictionaries
  • ; The collection of Linguistic Criteria by the directorate-general of Linguistic Politics
  • Nomenclàtor official de toponímia major de Catalunya by the Commission of Toponymy of Catalonia
  • ; Nomenclàtor toponímic de la Catalunya del Nord by the Institute of Catalan Studies in collaboration with the University of Perpinyà