About

The Sign Bank of the Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) began to be established in 2008 through the Sign Identifier, which we currently refer to as the old sign bank of Libras (QUADROS et al., 2014). The Sign Identifier was developed to compose the names of the signs for reference purposes for the annotation of signs. When a new sign appeared, the annotators made proposals for a new gloss that was evaluated and approved to integrate this bank of signs. The Sign Identifier stood out for the proposal of a search system that, in addition to offering the possibility of locating a term by its name in Portuguese, also enabled the search for the parameters of the sign, that is, for the visual characteristics of the sign. The sign parameter search system initially had two search filters: the initial hand configuration of the sign and the location of the sign. The search result presented a screen with the name that identified the sign in Portuguese, the video of the sign and the translations of the name into Portuguese and English. Later, the system has been migrated to Signbank of the Libras being integrated to Global Signbank (CRASBORN et al., 2012, 2018), losing the functionality to search for sign parameters. The decision to lose this very important functionality was because the system was not user-friendly and, therefore, no longer applied. However, our current proposal is to develop a more functional search system so that it can be effectively used by integrating it with Signbank as an open source code to be applied to the Signbank of Libras and to the other sign banks that integrate the Global Signbank. From the Global Signbank perspective, we started to consolidate the Libras Signbank in partnership with Humboldt Universität, to store signs produced in Libras productions, especially in the Libras Corpus, in the National Libras Inventory. We were inspired by the methodology of Global Signbank and developed more user-friendly search tools considering the improvement of the Signbank of Libras and the application to other sign languages, especially German Sign Language and International Sign Language. Signbank of the Libras presents information associated with each sign available online through the web of this free software. The objective is to provide a Libras sign bank open to national and international deaf communities, as well as to serve as a source of linguistic research. In this version of Signbank de Libras, we consolidate the partnership with Humboldt Universtät for its development and present the consolidated version with new resources for systematization and presentation of signs associated with the linguistic aspects that compose them, in addition to allowing direct access to the data from which were identified and entered into this database. Moreover, it can be linked directly to the ELAN software, a language annotation system, also used in Brazil to annotate Libras (CRASBORN et al., 2012, 2018; QUADROS, 2016; Stumpf et al., 2021).