Bart Braem in front of poster presentation.

Introduction
We have developed an online database driven dictionary system currently containing about 5000 signs(Aerts et al., 2003). These signs were (and are) collected by researchers of the university of Ghent and written down in SignWriting using SignWriter DOS(Gleaves, ). Our system can convert these binary €les to SWML, which is an XMLbased SignWriting representation language(da Rocha Costa and Dimuro, 2003). The major advantage of SignWriting in general and SWML in particular is that it is very lightweight and thus ideal for the web. Our database is modelled on the SWML structure to contain exactly the same information. The SignWriting system itself is a practical visual writing system for deaf sign languages, composed of a set of intuitive graphicalschematic symbols and simple rules for combining them to represent signs(da Rocha Costa and Dimuro, 2003). It was invented by Valerie Sutton inspired by her already created choreographical writing, called language DanceWritingSutton, a) Sutton, b). SignWriting symbols represent the body parts involved and the movements and faceexpressions made when producing signs. This way in an electronic representation each symbol is stored along with its transformations: translation, mirror and rotation. In this paper we provide an outline to construct an intuitive, userfriendly, yet powerful search by sign system for SignWriting. All information can be extracted from the signs only, without external information e.g. the position of the hand or the dominant hand...

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