Designing and evaluating a community-based digital dictionary system for the Balinese language: An IT innovation adoption study

Abstract

Regional and vulnerable languages increasingly depend on digital tools to remain visible and usable in everyday life, yet many dictionary initiatives are described mainly in terms of content or interface features rather than evaluated as information-system innovations. This paper presents an exploratory design science study of a community-based Balinese digital dictionary that supports bidirectional Balinese-Indonesian lookup, Latin and Balinese Unicode script, speech-level information, part-of-speech tagging, related-word search, and role-based contribution workflows. The platform is implemented as a web-based system with a three-tier architecture and relational database. To evaluate adoption readiness, 40 users completed representative tasks and then responded to an adapted Moore and Benbasat IT innovation adoption instrument covering seven constructs. The results show high ease of use, relative advantage, and compatibility, indicating strong functional value and fit with user routines. Image and visibility are moderate, while result demonstrability and visibility show lower reliability and are therefore interpreted as exploratory indicators. The study contributes both a documented digital-dictionary artefact for Balinese language support and a reusable evaluation approach for other early-stage community-facing information and communication technology (ICT) systems. The findings suggest that wider uptake depends not only on technical quality, but also on institutional visibility, outreach, and continued content enrichment.