OmegaWiki

One language at a time

2012-01-07T10:23:00.000-08:00

Some words (or expressions) are spelled the same in many languages. For example "India" is translated as "India" in tens of languages.

OmegaWiki used to load all these languages and display them in one page. This resulted in a few minutes of lag while the server was loading all the necessary data (also slowing down requests from other users), and in a huge page with many redundant and unnecessary data. This was even worse if a user decides to edit such a page.

From now on, an expression page displays only one language at a time, and a combobox appears to switch to other languages when the cursor hovers over the language name (see picture).

It also works while editing or viewing the history of a page. As expected, the server does not lag anymore for such a page. Gerard told me that Nauru has even more languages. Now you can click it without fear :-)

A nice side-effect is the possibility to link to a word in a specific language.
For example:
- http://www.omegawiki.org/index.php?title=Expression:main&explang=85 for the English word "main"
- http://www.omegawiki.org/index.php?title=Expression:main&explang=86 for the French word "main".

Coming next will be the possibility to filter which languages are shown in the translation tables and definitions, according to what the user wants to see.

More than 1000 images

2011-12-14T11:16:00.000-08:00

In February 2011, the possibility to add images to OmegaWiki was implemented. A few months later, we have already more than 1000 images. Images help to understand definitions and are an important feature of (online) dictionaries.

In OmegaWiki, when an image is added, it is attached to a particular concept, and is then displayed for all words representing that concept. Compared to Wiktionary where you would need to add an image of a concept for each page of each synonym, and for each page of each language, there is a lot of redundant work that is avoided.

As of today, there are about 47.000 concepts in OmegaWiki. It means that more than 2% of them have an image. It is not clear what percentage can be reached. Several concepts are abstract (feelings, reasonings), and other are verbs or names of languages and are hard to illustrate.

I find it particularly useful when a word with different meanings has different images, such as vampire, bluebottle, Mars, Venus, etc. Also interesting is to find an illustration for abstract concepts. This is sometimes possible: season, wake up or cheapskate.

P.S.: we have also almost 15.000 links to Wikipedia articles :-)

Selecting the interface language

2011-11-27T06:09:00.001-08:00

OmegaWiki tries to be as multilingual as possible in that its data is multilingual, and its interface can be displayed in any language supported by MediaWiki (more than 300 languages).

I've just added a combobox on the left to change the language of the interface. Previously, you had to create an account and change it in your preferences. Now, anonymous users can also change the language.

A nice feature is that when you set the interface language in your language, the definitions will be shown preferably in your language as well, when available.

Here is what it looks like for a word in German looked up with the interface in Piedmontese

I do not speak all languages, so I cannot test everything. Therefore I ask the question:
Is your language displayed correctly?

Thanks,
Kipcool

The Glosbe dictionary uses our data

2011-11-06T14:00:00.000-08:00

Glosbe.com is a multilingual dictionary where many bilingual translation dictionaries are available. It started earlier this year, and already have an impressive number of translations.

Their data come from several freely available online resources, including OmegaWiki. For example, the many words I have added in Bavarian are there:
http://glosbe.com/bar/en/essn

It also shows definitions from OmegaWiki, and inflexion tables from Wiktionary.
They have managed somehow to merge all these sources, and present them in an organized manner. For an example of a page with many sources involved, see: http://glosbe.com/fr/en/manger

Furthermore, Glosbe is also a translation memory, and they claim to have gathered more than 1 billion sentences already. I think this is a great resource for translators. New features will come in the future, they told me.

It is always nice to learn that someone uses our data. It makes our work meaningful!

OmegaWiki, Wiktionary and the Wikimedia Foundation

2011-10-25T10:25:00.000-07:00

Many people still ask me:

What is the point of OmegaWiki if we already have Wiktionary?
Why is OmegaWiki not a Wikimedia Foundation project?
When will OmegaWiki replace the Wiktionarys?

So I'll write my answers in this blog post, so that I can easily refer people to it when they ask ;-)

Why OmegaWiki was created

The idea of OmegaWiki came to several multilingual contributors to Wiktionary, somewhere around 2004.
In Wiktionary, when you want to add a French=>English translation, you would edit the French word at the French Wiktionary, and add the translation. If you want that the English Wiktionary also has your translation, you'll have to edit the French word at the English Wiktionary and add your translation.
You'll probably also want to add the same translation in the other direction, i.e. English=>French. This means that two more pages have to be edited. So, basically to indicate that a French word XX and an English word YY express the same concept, you'll have to edit 4 pages to be complete. Now, consider that there are 170 Wiktionaries as of today... There is much redundant work involved.
The same will happen if you want to add relations, such as hypernyms. Even though hypernyms are based on semantics, and are therefore (more or less) independent of languages, you'll have to edit all the Wiktionaries one by one to enter such a relation.
The idea of OmegaWiki is therefore to be based on concepts (what we call DefinedMeaning). You'll only need to edit that concept once to indicate that a French word XX and an English word YY are representing this concept.

So, OmegaWiki is created

Around 2007, the first prototype version of OmegaWiki came online (at the time, it was called WiktionaryZ, but renamed later on because it is not a WMF project).
Concerns were expressed such as:

I contributed so much data to Wiktionary, I want this data to be automatically imported before I come to OmegaWiki
it lacks a lot of features that I'd like to see before I come from Wiktionary (e.g. inflexions table which we still don't have)
discussions on such a multilingual project will be obviously mainly held in English, and my English is not good enough, so I prefer to stay on my language version of Wiktionary

Then, we had no programmer anymore to implement new features.

OmegaWiki is not a WMF project

OmegaWiki was created with the idea of becoming a project of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Its software is an extension of MediaWiki called Wikidata. The source code is stored on the WMF servers.
Its community is mostly made of people who came from Wiktionary and still contribute to other WMF projects (Wikipedia, Wikisource, etc.). So we are not so far away from the WMF...
However it has been said that OmegaWiki can become a WMF project only if it has already all the features of the Wiktionaries, and if it is decided whether OmegaWiki will replace the Wiktionaries or coexist with them.
This is problematic, because replacing the Wiktionaries means performing an automatic import, which is not possible. Coexisting with the Wiktionaries means that there are two projects with similar scopes supported by the WMF.
Having more features before becoming a WMF project is also a bit of a catch-22: becoming a WMF project would give us dedicated programmers who would add the needed features... In that respect, it would be nice to become a WMF project, even without the need to implement whatever missing features. We would also be happy to be hosted on the WMF servers, for a faster website.
The discussion on Meta is still open for comments and waiting for a decision. Cf. Requests for comment/Adopt OmegaWiki

What about an automatic import of Wiktionary?

So you want to import the Wiktionary(ies). Which Wiktionary?

All!
Then, you need to merge the data representing the same concepts from the different Wiktionaries. There is no easy way to do that with 170 Wiktionary each having its own structure.
Only the English Wiktionary
Because it is the biggest! Then, what do you do with the other Wiktionaries?

Also, importing the English Wiktionary alone, which would be a good start, is already not straightforward at all.
For example, one of the definitions of the word "medicine" at Wiktionary is A treatment or cure. Defining a word by using synonyms is not allowed at OmegaWiki, because all synonyms share the same definition, and you cannot define "cure" as a treatment or cure. So, the definition needs to be changed.
Furthermore, the page "medicine" at Wiktionary shows a list of translations in other languages for that concept. Other lists of other translations for the same concept will/could be found at the pages "treatment" and "cure". These lists need to be merged in order to be imported to OmegaWiki.

Doing it automatically, if feasible, is a lot of work. Doing it manually, i.e. checking whether the concept is already there and rewriting the definition where necessary, is totally possible: we have already achieved much with very few contributors.
Furthermore, some of the data such as IPA, gender, pinyin, declensions and conjugation tables, could be imported with a bot in the future.

My two cents,
Kipcool.

A better table sorting

2011-10-17T12:22:00.000-07:00

Some languages, such as French, German, Spanish, and many others use diacritics: é, í, ü, etc.

The normal sort function available in Javascript considers that any letter with a diacritic should be sorted after z. It was a bit annoying when using the French interface because the language names were not sorted as expected: "gaélique écossais" after "gallois", "géorgien" after "grec", and "hébreu" after "hongrois".

As can be seen on the following screenshot, this has been corrected (red dots identify languages which are now correctly sorted).

The combobox does not ignore you

2011-10-14T11:37:00.000-07:00

If you have edited OmegaWiki, you probably know about this annoying little bug where you want to select a language, type in some letters, but the list of languages that appears ignores the letters that you typed. This happened particularly when the server is busy. The "solution" was then to either add an extra letter, or remove one and put it back to make the system aware that you typed something.

Well, this bug has just been solved!

Now, when the combobox has finished displaying its list, it compares it with what is now typed in the field, and if something new has been typed, it refreshes the list consequently; and you get less annoyed.

As an experimental experiment, I have also changed the delay between when you type and when the list is generated to 100ms instead of 500ms.

Feedbacks welcome.

The Check Spambots extension

2011-08-03T13:18:00.000-07:00

We have recently opened the editing for anonymous users. As a consequence, we are spammed a lot more...

In the last days in particular, we have had in particular many spams from different IPs on a single page (but it is not so much of a problem because spambots are not capable of editing Wikidata pages, due to their different structure).

The website http://www.stopforumspam.com/ keeps an updated list of IPs that are spamming various websites, and all the IPs who spammed us on that day where already in their database. Therefore, it makes sense to use their data.

I knew the possibility to import Stopforumspam's IP list to the blacklist of a MediaWiki installation. However, it is stated that
[... you should] allocate a few more megabytes of APC cache... as, with this 1300000-byte file added to your configuration, you'll need it.
Since we already have problems with memory on the OmegaWiki server (only 1GB), it could have been problematic. An other problem is that the list is not refreshed automatically.

By clicking around, I then discovered the Check Spambots extension. This extension sends a query directly to some online IP-spam databases, among them Stopforumspam. An advantage is that you don't need more memory in your wiki, and the list stays up to date. An inconvenience is the additional time needed to query the external website (however, very quick from what I observed), but I made a small modification so that it does not affect logged-in users anyway.

Now we should have fewer spam, I hope :-)

Random expression

2011-07-28T11:08:00.000-07:00

The link to show a random expression is now working as expected.

You can try it on the website (left panel) or with the link below:

Random expression from OmegaWiki

I got bugenwilla , it even has an image :-)

SQL dump with only lexical data

2011-07-13T09:16:00.000-07:00

For people only interested in our lexical data, but not to create their own copy of the OmegaWiki website (including the wiki pages), there is now a dump called "lexical data dump".

Cf. http://www.omegawiki.org/Help:Downloading_the_data#Lexical_data_dump

Until now, the only option was to download a full SQL dump containing all the data (except for private user data). The full dump is large (more than 1GB uncompressed) and it takes a long time to process. The lexical data dump is much smaller (around 175MB uncompressed).

OmegaWiki database explained

2011-07-10T11:22:00.000-07:00

This week-end, I have written the documentation of the tables used by WikiData and OmegaWiki. As far as I know, we were missing this kind of documentation.

It can be consulted at:
http://www.omegawiki.org/Help:OmegaWiki_database_layout

For anybody interested in the technical aspect: have a look, correct the mistakes, ask for clarifications or sample MySQL queries, etc. :-)

I hope it helps.

Thanks,
Kipcool.

More than 300 languages

2011-07-09T11:06:00.000-07:00

At OmegaWiki, it is now possible to add definitions and translations in more than 300 languages.

Today were added the following languages.
- Assyrian Neo-Aramaic
- Bikol Central
- Central Aymara
- Chamorro
- Filipino
- Jingpho
- Northern Sami

Among all our languages :
- 227 have more than 10 words
- 122 have > 100 words
- 55 have > 1.000 words
- 11 have > 10.000 words
and English is getting close to 50.000.

We also have definitions in more than 100 languages (though not for all concepts... all help is welcome)

For more statistics, visit the statistics page.

Subscribing to the Word of the Day

2011-07-07T10:25:00.000-07:00

Since the beginning of OmegaWiki, in 2005, we have had a Word of the Day, almost every day.

The Word of the Day is displayed on the main page and is a nice invitation to contribute, either by adding translations, definitions, an image, or any other information.

From now on, it is possible to subscribe to the Word of the Day, either via Facebook, or with an RSS feed (generated by Facebook). The word of the day is also displayed on the right of this blog. Of course you are all welcome to subscribe and contribute ;-)

Today, the word of the day is mac 'n' cheese . It is something I ate recently. Very good when you don't care about your weight...

Main Page design changed

2011-07-05T11:12:00.000-07:00

MediaWiki 1.17 came with the pretty Vector skin. This skin has the search field on top, and consequently I removed the pre-existing search area on top of the main page.

Then I centered the title, played a bit with the css border-radius, removed the boxes that nobody uses, and resized the looong list of language portals so that it takes more width (and less height).

Here is how it should look on modern browsers:

You can visit http://www.omegawiki.org and have a look! If you see squares where it should be round, you need to upgrade your browser...

The main pages for the other languages need to be updated as well. You can help! For the few languages where it was already up to date with the last version, it will not be too much of an effort. For the other ones, it requires a bit more time, but it is not complicated.

We are also planning on adding a section "Did you know?", updated e.g. daily, with interesting facts on words of all languages and interdependencies between languages. More on that later!

OmegaWiki upgraded to MediaWiki 1.17

2011-06-30T12:27:00.000-07:00

OmegaWiki has been successfully upgraded to the brand new MediaWiki 1.17.

Most of the changes are internal things (the database structure has changed, and several things had to be rewritten here and there to be compatible with the new version).

As a user, you might notice that everything still works like before :)

You will also experience the new interface (Vector) which is now default, like in the Wikipedias. The old interface (Monobook) can be activated in your preferences.

The upgrade also permitted to get the latest translations for the interface and to upgrade the extensions. Some of them where 1-2 years old.

Feedback on any bugs that you may find are more than welcome.

Automatic search suggestions

2011-06-20T14:40:00.000-07:00

The automatic search suggestion, that has been available at Wikipedia for some time now, has just been enabled at OmegaWiki.

Now, when you type a text in the search box, it suggests results according to the words that are present in our database.

At the moment, the "Expression:" will unfortunately appear, as well as data from UMLS and Swissprot that we would need to filter out. In fact, the functionality should be rewritten specifically for OmegaWiki, with also the possibility to specify a language (a nice mix of php, java and sql... anybody interested in programming it?)

However, I think it is already useful as it is now.

You are all invited to try it out (no need to be logged in).

Note that if you don't like, you can disable it in your user preferences under "Search Options" => "Disable AJAX suggestions".

Example sentences can be long

2011-05-09T13:23:00.000-07:00

For some reason, the text annotations - contrary to definitions - were limited to 256 characters. This was too limiting for example sentences, in particular when these examples are citations where you need to extract a long sentence and add the title of the book, the author, etc.

This limit has just been extended. From now on, text annotations can be as long as definitions.

Other text annotations include IPA, hyphenation and other language specific annotations such as pinyin for Mandarin. At the moment, you can access the annotations by clicking on the link "" in the last column of the translation table. We are still working on a way of making the annotations more visible for the word that is being consulted.

E-Mail functionality now working again

2011-03-10T12:09:00.000-08:00

I have just noticed today that OmegaWiki was not sending any E-Mail. For example when you forget your password, you couldn't have it e-mailed to you.

This is probably due to the server change in March last year.

I've just repaired the functionality.

Thanks,
Kipcool.

Images to illustrate the definitions

2011-02-21T12:15:00.000-08:00

There is now the possibility to add images from Commons in order to illustrate the definitions and make OmegaWiki look prettier.

The following is a screenshot of Expression:mouse.

The image annotation is given at the DefinedMeaning level, which means that when the image is added once to the concept, it becomes available for all the languages : souris , Maus , etc.

Anyone can edit!

2011-02-15T12:30:00.000-08:00

As of today, anonymous users can also contribute to OmegaWiki, without the need to create an account and having to wait to be given edit rights by a bureaucrat.

However, since we do not have roll back functionalities at the moment, IP users can add new data, but not modify existing data.

Let's see what comes out of it (more spam or more contributors?).

Taboo subjects

2011-02-08T10:54:00.000-08:00

Hi,

there is an ongoing discussion at omegawiki about why OmegaWiki is struggling (the number of contributors stays low), and what to do about it, such as find money and hire a developer.

Please take part in the discussion and submit your ideas.

Thanks,
Kipcool.

#Conceptwiki

2010-07-29T12:49:00.000-07:00

The ConceptWiki environment is an umbrella for several categories of professional data. It is hosted by NBIC / the Concept Web Alliance and it provides a rich environment with many types of data that have a bio-medical background.

The software it uses is very similar to the one used by OmegaWiki. This is due to the long association between people behind OmegaWiki and the ConceptWiki. It used to be that there was no room for multi-lingual content in the ConceptWiki but that is changing.

The hosting of OmegaWiki and the ConceptWiki used to be on the same server. this made it easy to connect OmegaWiki translations to ConceptWiki ontological content. For a concept like yaws you find many translations at OmegaWiki, you also find a link to the Wikipedia article and a mapping to the UMLS part of its database.

Indonesian dance mask

There is no Commons category yet on the subject, otherwise you might find this mask depicting the face of a sufferer of this disease.

The plan is to bring OmegaWiki and the ConceptWiki closer together again. I hope that the ConceptWiki will become a multilingual resource and we are going to start by sharing resources.
Thanks,
GerardM

Endangered African languages

2010-07-29T05:38:00.000-07:00

Sorosoro is a program that aims at studying and documenting endangered languages.

They have recently published videos of native people giving some vocabulary in four endangered African languages: Punu, Mpongwe, Akele and Benga. The words are about body parts, numbers, colors and common phrases.

I have enabled these languages for editing at OmegaWiki and added all the words mentioned in the videos. By doing so, these translations are not only available to people speaking English, French or Spanish (the three languages of the video), but to all the other languages at OmegaWiki.

We now have 28 expressions in Akele and Benga, 59 in Mpongwe and 78 in Punu.

If you know about more resources (vocabulary) for endangered languages, you are more than welcome to mention them.

Thanks,
Kipcool.

So we like #Commons

2010-07-21T17:15:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Kipcool surprised us with a more visible link to Wikipedia, today he added Commons to it as well. Commons is essentially different in that there is only one link to Commons per concept.

When you look for pictures of a horse at Google or Bing, it makes a big difference in what language you are looking for that animal. If you look for instance for an "សេះ" you will find far fewer horses.

This is what it looks like in Arabic. As there is an annotation referring to the Arabic Wikipedia article, the Arabic article is selected.
Thanks,
GerardM

So we like #Wikipedia ...

2010-07-20T14:46:00.000-07:00

Every now and then, I am happily surprised with new functionality for OmegaWiki. This time Kipcool made our existing Wikipedia visible. When there are references to a Wikipedia article, he will point you to the article in your language.

The expression dólar shows the Dutch Wikipedia article for me. It will show the Spanish article for Ascander and the English article for Kipcool (the French and German article are not linked yet).

The link is added to the page with Javascript. This prevents additional load on our server. I hope you like it, it is an other excellent reason to dig into our annotions.
Thanks,
GerardM

Démoustication

2010-06-09T00:48:00.000-07:00

For #OmegaWiki it is relevant to find as many translations as possible. This is what makes the concept work. The French word démoustication has as its definition "The control or reduction of a mosquito population in a certain place". This definition has me check if "muggenbestrijding" exists in the Dutch language. It does and I can even find pictures of people shooting with air guns on mosquitoes..

Having only three expressions for mosquito control is ok, as it is there with a definition in two languages. It is important to know the word. When the same concept appears starting with a different language we will always be able to merge the two DefinedMeanings.
Thanks,
GerardM

#Wikipedia interlanguage links

2010-06-06T12:40:00.000-07:00

On a mailing list of the WMF there is a big discussion about interlanguage links; should they be shown by default or not. This discussion is the result of a choice made by the Usability team to hide them. Many people have strong opinions, one of the best contributions is one by Gregory Maxwell.

That thread is not the place to improve the approaches to interlanguage links. The goal of these alternate approaches is to increase the number of people that are informed by a Wikipedia.

Alternative one
Allow for interlanguage pages when there is not even a stub. We aim to inform, but when there is no article, not even a stub, we currently do not inform. The page may include a definition, but what it should show is articles on this subject can be found in these languages. Followed by a list of languages and the names of the articles.

This is easy to implement. The links are still maintained by bots and these referral pages do not need to show elsewhere.

Alternative two
The technology behind OmegaWiki supports links to Wikipedia articles for quite some time. It even refers to Commons categories filled with data files on a subject.

This alternative is a bit more involved, but it allows for more functionality. It may need to need some fiddling in order to get it ready for WMF usage, but hey it is great functionality with many links to Wikipedia in there already.
Thanks,
GerardM

#Omegawiki WOTD; adénosine

2010-06-02T22:49:00.000-07:00

Today's word of the day is adénosine it is the French word for adenosine. It was a word started by Kipcool and I added some bits and pieces to the concept.

The first thing I did was add a load of translations. As I want to have on average more then 10 Expressions per DefinedMeaning, it has more effect to add translations then to start a new DefinedMeaning.

The second thing I did was to make it part of the chemical compound class. Once adenosine was known as a chemical compound, I was able to add some annotations like the chemical formula. The last thing I did was to map it to the concept adenosine in the UMLS. This is really valuable for those who want to map the translations of OmegaWiki to the rich information that can be found in this resource.
Thanks,
GerardM

A guest blog about the Telugu experience

2010-06-02T06:56:00.000-07:00

I am happy to welcome Veeven's contribution to the OmegaWiki blog.

We now have 1,000+ Telugu expressions and 35 definitions in Telugu in OmegaWiki. It is nothing when compared to the words in Telugu language. However, I think it is a good first step.

To show off, here is a screen shot showing the multiple meanings for the word "వర్ణము":

I joined OmegaWiki in 2008. I didn't add so many expressions or definitions in the two years. From about a month ago, I started working more regularly.

Working on OmegaWiki is a different experience. It is nice to see more and more of the interface change to Telugu as you work on Community class attributes and language names. One drawback is the performance: when editing, the pages load slowly and be non-responsive for a second or two (browser trying to sort the tables). I hope it gets better.

I wish more people come forward and contribute to Telugu on OmegaWiki.

Support for Telugu in #OmegaWiki II

2010-05-29T05:22:00.000-07:00

When Veeven added పీడ్మోంటీ for Piedmontese, it was the last language with no translation in Telugu that had a translation for Telugu.

As a consequence almost all the labels used on the concept Telugu are now available in Telugu. Because of the hard work done at translatewiki.net, the experience is great even though there are just 805 expressions in Telugu at this time.

What you do have is for instance a translations from English to Spanish in great numbers. Having this with a Telugu interface is one reason why the investment in time is worth it.

At this time there are 249 languages supported in OmegaWiki. Your language may be among them. You can make the same difference for the people that read and write your language.
Thanks,
GerardM

Support for Telugu in #OmegaWiki

2010-05-18T14:12:00.000-07:00

When Veeven added the Telugu numeral, I was really pleased as I had been trying for some time to elevate the number of Telugu expressions over the 500.

I was really surprised when the labels did not change to Telugu. Happily Kipcool found that the "Wikimedia key" was missing and now everything works as designed for Telugu.
Thanks,
GerardM

Community class attributes

2010-05-18T05:05:00.000-07:00

In #OmegaWiki the community class attributes are a collection of words or phrases that are used as labels for attributes of a class. In the last few days a few attributes were added to the "number" class. This was to allow the expression of numbers in Thai, Laotian and Telugu.

These 65 words are with the names of languages the most relevant concepts. They are effectively what localises the data for the people who selected a language in their interface.

It is really appreciated when they are completed with some urgency; this is what makes OmegaWiki functional for our readers.
Thanks,
GerardM

#Ambaradan release 0.6.0

2010-05-09T23:00:00.000-07:00

The first release of Ambaradan has hit the Internet. It hit the Internet and, it intends to stay there. So congratulations to the ream that has been working so hard to get to this stage, it is an awesome development.

The software as you can find it, is a first alpha release and it does not have all its functionality yet. As I have observed Ambaradan for a few days, I can testify that several bug fixes and improvements have gone in. So it is very much something to be watched.

One of the really cool features is that Ambaradan provides web font support; this means that as long as they can find a freely licensed Unicode font you will not need to install a font on your system.

It will be interesting to follow the development of Ambaradan, I hope that the ambitious specifications will slowly but surely make it into reality. The potential is there to become awesome.
Thanks,
GerardM

Polyglot functionality on #OmegaWiki

2010-05-05T12:35:00.000-07:00

#Multilingual #MediaWiki is really helped by the Polyglot extension. What it does is show for instance the main page in your language if there is a translation. This helps the usability of OmegaWiki and any other installation a lot when multilinguality is important.

There are a few cotchas, the first is that it prefers the ISO 630-1 code when one is available. This means en in stead of eng, fr / fra, nl / nld .. This is the same for the Babel extension. However, this extension that the change to the short version for you.

Given that the ISO 639-6 will restore the primacy of existing two character codes, it makes sense for OmegaWiki to use this algorithm.

When Kipcool had a look at the code, he found that for OmegaWiki only a few lines were really needed... If you want to see the default or English text, you can always add "&redirect=no" to the URL.

Statistics, because we love them

2010-05-04T13:06:00.000-07:00

I could not even say that we were looking at the statistics again, considering that we might want multiple statistics, or less then a day later we have multiple new statistics. Kipcool outdid himself..

Not only does it show the statistics in "your" language, when "your" language shows from right to left, so will the statistics.

Syntrans statistics in the Arabic script

As you can see, it shows nicely with Arabic characters, you will believe that it does the Latin script (boring), it also does Cyrillic, Devanagari and ..

Definitions in Georgian

These two statistics are new, the first ie the "Syntrans statistics" show all the words used for a language and as such it includes homonyms and synonyms. The second shows the number of definitions that exist for a language.

We are really happy with the result so far, now we have to phase out the old statistics and see if we want to do some caching of results.
Thanks,
GerardM

Statistics ... a work in progress

2010-05-02T11:58:00.000-07:00

At #OmegaWiki we have nice statistics, nice bar graphs that show the number of expressions for each language. The numbers are nice except.. except for the language of the labels.. they are in English. This is not really how we want to present them because we pride ourselves on our multilingual support.

Now that we are looking again at our numbers, we are considering what numbers to show. The DefinedMeanings, the Expressions or the Syntrans records. The first shows the number of concepts, the second the number of expressions that are used for a language and the last will include the homonyms as well. What do you think?

Obviously these numbers show the current status and you can help us improve these numbers.
Thanks,
GerardM

હાથકડી is the word of the day

2010-04-29T03:40:00.000-07:00

Everyday at #OmegaWiki another word of the day. There are several people who divine what it should be. Sometimes the word is in the news, sometimes like today it is a word that was added the previous day.

OmegaWiki currently supports 247 languages and when you look at the distribution of the words over the languages you find that it tails off quite sharply. This does not mean that expressions in languages like Gujarati are not welcome. For from it and, to show our wish for collaborators for for instance Gujarati, હાથકડી is today's word of the day.
Thanks,
GerardM

#Wikipedia article

2010-04-19T11:50:00.000-07:00

At #OmegaWiki we have twenty translations of the phrase "Wikipedia article". This phrase is one of the Community class attributes, these are used to indicate a relation.

The relation indicated by the "Wikipedia article" is an article in the Wikipedia of that language. Currently many articles are referred to in the English and the Spanish Wikipedia.

We would appreciate it when you help us with translations for this phrase in your language.
Thanks,
GerardM

Word not found

2010-04-18T10:24:00.000-07:00

When an expression is not found at #OmegaWiki, a link will be proposed for you to create either a new article or a new expression..

Kipcool informed me about this on IRC, he also expressed his amazement at the speed in which localisations become available at translatewiki.net. There are already localisations for 10 languages for the new message.
Thanks,
GerardM

What to do when a word is not part of your vocabulary

2010-04-18T07:57:00.000-07:00

Every now and then, I find a word that I do not know. For a normal person, it is a trip to the dictionary, for me it is a trip to OmegaWiki and often I find that the word is not yet in there.

Today it was the word cohort that I did not know. I knew it as something to do with Roman military, but it has also something to do with statistics..

I like pictures in my blogs, people playing soldiers is more fun to look at then some bar charts.
Thanks,
GerardM

The ratio between DefinedMeanings and Expressions

2010-04-15T02:01:00.000-07:00

#OmegaWiki as a resource provides information in many languages. Currently there are some 245 languages enabled for the inclusion of expressions. I often add words that feature as an Apertium concept and in order for it to be useful for the purpose of Apertium, it is important to add as many translations as possible.

As a consequence we currently have some 9.27 Expressions for every DefinedMeaning. Slowly but surely this ratio is moving upward and this provides some secret motivation :) This does not mean that we have something like 9.27 translations for every concept; an Expression is just a string of characters and when this string of characters is used in multiple languages or is used for multiple concepts, it is still only one Expression.

I would love to know what the ratio is between the number of concepts and the number of translations; it will be a higher number ..
Thanks,
GerardM

15,000 #Portuguese expressions in #OmegaWiki

2010-04-13T07:33:00.000-07:00

We are happy to have a sufficient number of expressions in the Portuguese language at OmegaWiki. It shows how OmegaWiki provides the functionality that you will not find elsewhere.

The labels are shown in Portuguese when you have selected Portuguese as your default language. Better still, when you edit in OmegaWiki, the same labels can be selected in Portuguese.

We would dearly love to provide the same functionality to languages like Telugu, Kannada, Abchaz, Guarani.. We can help by pointing out how you can quickly provide a localised environment, we can help by adding the expressions for any languages when we find them. In the end we need people interested in supporting their language.
Thanks,
GerardM

Working on the #Apertium M list

2010-04-09T02:31:00.000-07:00

When you want to add content to #OmegaWiki, it helps when you have a goal. As you can see from the abundance of "red links", there is plenty left to do to add to the Apertium words that start with an "M".

Apertium as you may recall is a free/open-source machine translation platform. Working on the Apertium lists in OmegaWiki makes sense because its content is freely licensed as well and, the Apertium people are welcome to use it for their purposes.
Thanks,
GerardM

OmegaWiki is back on line

2010-03-23T14:01:00.000-07:00

When a technician does not know that a live application is running on a server, he will just turn the server off. That is what happened to OmegaWiki two weeks ago.

What happened next was an amazing group of people getting together, they found someone in the USA willing to go to the office where the server was, take it home and in a multi-continent operation get the data from that system.

OmegaWiki is now operational again; it runs on a server of Erik Moeller, Siebrand, Kim and Marc worked on the issue from the Netherlands and Cyde in the USA. Once the server was up and running, it was Kipcool who got everything working again.

I am really grateful for the hosting we received in the past from Knewco, I am really grateful and happy for the support of so many fine men who brought this project that has so much passion, love, work in it back from the brink.

I have added some translations for the concept Wikipedia, I enjoyed the fact that I could add all the different expressions all in one go. I needed them for some work at translatewiki.net
Thanks,
GerardM

Off line (progress report II)

2010-03-20T01:15:00.000-07:00

The OmegaWiki server is now connected to the Internet. The data is being moved so happily a positive progress report :)
Thanks,
GerardM

Off line (progress report)

2010-03-19T03:31:00.000-07:00

Sadly things have not progressed as quickly as we would have hoped. I understand that today the server will be picked up to transfer the data from the server and prepare for a relaunch.

More info when I have it ..
Thanks,
GerardM

Off line

2010-03-06T03:36:00.000-08:00

OmegaWiki is for the moment off line. Our host forgot that OmegaWiki was on their server. It will be available again soon I have been promissed.

It does however mean that we are looking for hosting elsewhere.
Thanks,
GerardM

400.000 expressions

2010-02-18T09:50:00.000-08:00

Today at OmegaWiki we have reached the milestone of 400.000 expressions for more than 43.000 concepts in 242 languages.

It was longer to reach than expected, because the statistics where first too optimistic by showing 20.000 more expressions than we actually had. This is now fixed.

The statistics reveals that, among these 242 languages, 49 have more than 1.000 expressions, and 10 have more than 10.000, namely English, Castilian, German, Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, Finnish and Polish. The first seven of these languages correspond to the languages in which the regular contributors are native (or fluent).

What is not known is how many definitions we have in these languages. An improvement of the statistics page is needed.

Thanks,
Kipcool.

Adding multiple translations at once

2010-02-16T09:12:00.000-08:00

At Omegawiki, it used to be that if you want to add 10 translations or synonyms to a word, you have to add them one by one. This implies that the page is reloaded 10 times. It takes time for the contributor, and load for the server.

But now, with a bit of java, there is the possibility to add multiple translations without reloading the page.

For this, you just have to click on the green "+" and a new row appears.

I give translations as an example, but it works also for definitions, classes, annotations, etc.

I am glad, it is my first steps in the AJAX world, and it will allow us to reach faster the 400k milestone.

Thanks,
Kipcool.

Language specific annotations

2010-01-26T11:40:00.000-08:00

In order to allow for transcriptions (see previous post), I implemented the possibility to have language specific annotations.

Up to now, it was already possible to have language specific annotations only when that annotation is a list of options. For example, gender shows "masculine" and "feminine" in French, and "masculine", "feminine" and "neutrum" in German (and nothing in English). However, the other annotations (texts and link) were always available for all languages.

Language specific annotations allow for example that the annotation "pinyin" shows up only for words in Mandarin. This is now possible, and configurable by adding the corresponding annotations to the language definedMeaning (e.g. Mandarin (simplified) , Japanese ).

At the moment, the following transcriptions are available:
- pinyin for simplified Mandarin and traditional Mandarin
- revised Hepburn romanization for Japanese
- Hiragana and Katakana for Japanese (as a way of reading a word in kanji)

More transcriptions can be easily added, as soon as a contributor shows interest in it.

It is possible to do more than just transcriptions with language specific annotations. For example, we could imagine to have links to some public domain (for example Webster) or authoritative English dictionaries (Oxford dictionary online), as a way of providing an attestation for a given syntrans (spelling + definition). Such a link would be available only for English words.

Other ideas and thoughts are welcome.

Kipcool.

Romanizations in Omegawiki

2010-01-19T10:58:00.000-08:00

Romanizations are important to learn a language since it allows us, Latin alphabet readers, to read a word in a non-Latin script.

We are going to implement romanizations in OmegaWiki as text attributes. However, there are several concurring romanization systems for each non-Latin script, and it has to be decided which systems we are going to use.

First of all, there are several ISO norms for romanizations: (Wikipedia link). There are also many other romanization systems which are not ISO norms.

Among the languages and scripts listed in Wikipedia, I have knowledge and interest in Mandarin and Japanese. So, I'll discuss them below. For the rest, help is welcome.

For Mandarin Chinese, it is clear that the ISO norm, i.e. pinyin, is to be used. It is what is in the books when we learn the language, and what appears in almost all dictionaries, it is the most used system to write Chinese on a computer, and it is even taught to Chinese people at school.

For Japanese, the situation is not easy. The ISO norm is the Kunrei-shiki romanization . However, the most widely used seems to be the Hepburn romanization . It is the one that is used in my books at home. So we have the choice between several possibilities:
- should we use the Kunrei-shiki only, because it is ISO,
- should we use the Hepburn only, because it is the most widely used,
- or should we implement both?

For the other non-Latin scripts and languages , if you have knowledge or interest in Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Georgian, Armenian, Thai, Korean, Indic scripts or any other script that is not in the list, you are welcome to give your thoughts about the following question (here or at the International Beer Parlour):

"Should we use the ISO norm, or another system?"

Thanks,
Kipcool.

P.S.: there is also the cyrillization of Japanese. Is it a desired feature as well?

Etymologies

2010-01-06T13:54:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Dh, it is now possible to add etymologies in Omegawiki (in fact, since about a month).

It has been implemented as a translatable text attribute. It means that the etymologies for any word can be explained in all languages.

This may seem like an overkill, and actually, the initial idea was to have only one text field, and to enter the etymology of a word in the language of that word, since we expected that only people who know a language would be interested in etymologies of words of that language.

However, while I might be interested in the etymology of a Latin word, I am not able to write it in Latin, and there is also no particular reason to write it only in English in that case.

What is missing now is the possibility to have etymons as links to the corresponding DefinedMeanings. This is also a desired feature for having the words of a definition linking to the corresponding DM to avoid ambiguity, and will need further development.

Have fun adding etymologies,
Kipcool.

Linking to external ontologies

2009-12-13T07:38:00.000-08:00

At Omegawiki, it is already possible to add links to Wikipedia and Commons.

In order to be part of the Web 2.0 , we are now considering adding links to external ontologies as well. There are many ontologies out there. For example, there is a small list on Wikipedia. From the discussions we had, there are several ways of linking to them:

We only link to Wikipedia and Commons (this is the current situation).
We link to as many ontologies as we like, as soon as there is a contributor willing to add links to it.
We link to a few ontologies that we consider authoritative or relevant.
We link to only one (or two?) super-ontologies, where we expect that this ontology will link back to other ontologies (and ideally to Omegaiki).

There are problems with each proposition.

Why only Wikipedia and Commons?
If we link to too many ontologies, we cannot keep track of what they are for, and then it is expected that we will be lost in too many links. We also have the risk that some user will come with their favorite ontology that do not bring any information to Omegawiki users, and are therefore useless links.
What is an authoritative ontology? What is relevant? and for what purpose (OmegaWiki users, or automatic processing by programs)? In this case, each ontology of possible interested has to be discussed by the Omegawiki community, and it has to be clear what information it brings.
What is this super-ontology? The name of Opencyc has been proposed. Opencyc links for example to Wikipedia, Umbel, Wordnet and Dbpedia. However, Opencyc does not link for example to geonames.

For more details, you can read and give your opinion on the discussions taking place in the omegawiki beer parlour: here and there.

Thanks,
Kipcool.

Colors in the interface

2009-12-05T11:40:00.000-08:00

In order to make OmegaWiki less austere, colors have been added in the interface:
- light red for each language entry
- light blue for each definition or concept
For an example, have a look at Expression:wild

Note that these colors have been chosen to match, more or less, the colors of the OmegaWiki logo ;-)

These changes involve only a modification of the Monobook.css, so each user can also re-configure it to his own taste.

We are looking for more ideas to make the interface more appealing. Please do not hesitate to make any suggestion, should it involve only a css change or even a change in the php.

Thanks,
Kipcool.

Thank you Brion

2009-10-08T13:17:00.000-07:00

Brion has added Kipcool to the illustrious roster of MediaWiki developers. His first contribution to OmegaWiki is a nice one; when you translate from one language to the the next, the definitions will be shown in the source language when available.

This is a much more friendly approach when translating from one language to the next ... Thank you Brion for making it possible to have cause to thank Kipcool :)
Thanks,
Gerard

Two improvements

2009-09-03T13:02:00.000-07:00

Kipcool has written two nice improvements:

"patch-needstranslation" changes the SpecialNeedsTranslation in that :
instead of link to "Expression:", we have a link to the actual "DefinedMeaning:"
that needs to be translated.

"patch-classes" changes the way the classes are displayed when you want to
add a class to an element.
The current way displays in the first column the name of the classes
and in the second column, the collection to which the class belongs
(which is almost always "Omegawiki Community database")
I have changed it so that the second column now displays a definition of the class.

Note: "patch-classes" also includes additional documentation in the code,
that I am trying to add when I understand what a function does.

Thanks,
GerardM

A new patch went life

2009-08-19T16:52:00.000-07:00

Kipcool had written an improvement on the Expression needing translation special page. The page now shows the number of expressions that exist in one language and have no translation in the other language.

I have had fun playing with it, you find that there are words in Hindi that have no equivalent in Dutch.
Thanks,
GerardM

Multi lingual support

2009-07-22T00:50:00.000-07:00

When you support languages like OmegaWiki does, then there are two levels where this support is provided.

Localisation of the user interface
Localisation of the data

With the recent major upgrade of OmegaWiki we moved up from release 1.10a to 1.16a. As a consequence we gained the massive amount of localisations that had been provided to MediaWiki by the fine people at translatewiki.net. This is shown really well in for instance the Russian language..

The complete user interface is now in Russian. We will be able to do even better in the future. We will implement the "LocalisationUpdate" extension; this allow us to continuously adopt all relevant new localisations as committed to the code repository from translatewiki.net.

Making OmegaWiki a resource that is continuously updated for its multi language support is a dream come true. Really important in this has been the perseverence of RobertL. He got to grips with the complicated even convoluted code that makes OmegaWiki. His work included a lot of sanitising of the code base, this will make it not that hard for us to upgrade in the future.

One other upgrade is planned; this is the implementation of the Babel extension. We will be saying goodbye to all the current templates. They have served us well but they have been an absolute pain to maintain. Smaller project like OmegaWiki are best served by getting the localisations for this functionality from one central place. It makes thousands of templates redundant and, new localisations will now be provided on a daily basis through the LocalisationUpdate.

All in all, the latest major upgrade to OmegaWiki has been an important and most necessary boost to our code base. It adds a new sparkle to our project.

Thanks,

GerardM

Upgrading the system

2009-07-20T01:33:00.001-07:00

OmegaWiki is expected to go completely offline on Monday 20th July at 14:00 UTC for a major upgrade lasting several hour

ISBN 978-3-03911-799-4

2009-06-19T04:48:00.000-07:00

Last year I spoke at a conference in Aarhus, Denmark at the Centre for Lexicography at the Aarhus school of business. I was asked to write an article about what I had to say. I did, and with pleasure I received a complimentary copy in the post titled "Lexicography at a Crossroads".

Sadly the publication is not published as an Open Access work so you will have to find a copy when you want to read my essay "The Philosophy behind OmegaWiki and the Visions for the Future". There is always the presentation that I gave at the conference..
Thanks,
GerardM

WOTD publicatie

2009-05-06T00:01:00.000-07:00

The word of the day is publicatie. The reason is, that a book with articles by the people who presented has been published. My article is about the philosphy behind OmegaWiki. Now I will have to figure out how to update my profile at wikiprofessional...
Thanks,
GerardM

Ambaradan

2009-03-31T08:24:00.000-07:00

OmegaWiki as a project works; concepts are added and we call them DefinedMeanings, we add Expressions to them and they are either synonyms or translations. We can add part of speech information, we can refer to Wikipedia articles or Commons pictures. All these things we can do in the language selected in your user interface.

OmegaWiki does all these things but there is a problem; the software as it is, is convoluted. A programmer new to the code does not like it. Some hate it with a passion and some looked at it and walked away. This is not good. This is one reason why not much happened with OmegaWiki, the other reason is that we started the development of OmegaWiki mark II.

We created a proof of concept that demonstrated that we can provide multi lingual support to Commons and the next bit was that on the basis of the database backend we would create a new front end, it would be OmegaWiki mark II.

Bèrto went off the grid, it was not possible to contact him in a normal way and now, many months later he appears to have written something called Ambaradan. At this moment there is documentation what it is supposed to do. This documentation is very intriguing and I think that it may even work.

Obviously Ambaradan is welcome to the OmegaWiki content and once there is a user interface to the data, I will be interested to learn how it presents the data. What I will be looking for is how you can configure what information can be entered for a language and how you can relate information entered in one language to information in another.

There are several projects I am involved in that are anxious to learrn Ambaradan's potential. Many things have been on hold and for several projects alternatives are being looked at..

Ambaradan has surfaced, it may be great. At this stage there is not enough to go on.
Thanks,
GerardM

A new user ,,, many new languages

2009-02-18T16:16:00.000-08:00

A new user came to OmegaWiki and he wanted to add content in the Mayan languages. All of them "except that funny one from veracruz which only recently got classified as Mayan". All of them because this new user comes with an existing dictionary and this has "all of them".

Now the Mayan languages are not easily classified; The way Ethnologue had it is not how the ISO-639-3 has it at this time. This means that we will have to carefully understand what the relation is between the languages in the dictionaries and the codes maintained by SIL.
Thanks,
GerardM

OmegaWiki has moved

2009-02-16T08:13:00.000-08:00

The hosting of OmegaWiki is on a server by Knewco. Knewco has moved its servers from one location to another and as a consequence OmegaWiki would have been off line for a couple of days. This was not a good plan.

A friend of mine, Tom Maaswinkel, provided us with temporary server space. Kim Bruning, another friend, has done the migration. At this moment, the DNS has been changed and we are testing the new server.

Everything should be working smoothly again.
Thanks,
GerardM

PS this is the 100th blog entry :)

What a difference a day makes

2009-01-26T08:40:00.000-08:00

When you compare this screen shot with the one in my previous blog entry, you will agree that the right to left support has improved quite a lot.

One concern that has been raised is what the MediaWiki developers will say about this. It is obvious that there will be many people who get a different view and consequently the cache will be affected. My idea is that as this is about improved functionality, cache efficiency is secondary to a very large extend.
Thanks,
GerardM

Right, to the left

2009-01-26T04:08:00.000-08:00

OmegaWiki is a multi lingual environment. We have been proud to support your language. When your language is not supported, you can ask. When your language is not properly supported, you can make the difference.

There was one thing though.. Languages like Arabic or Hebrew should go right to left. They did not.
Thanks,
GerardM

artigo na Wikipédia

2009-01-25T00:27:00.000-08:00

When you change the language in your user preferences, the presentation of the labels of the OmegaWiki data will change as well. It will tell you for instance where you can find the Wikipedia article in a given language.

The phrase "artigo na Wikipédia" is todays "Word of the day". Yesterday this translation was added and consequently the user interface for Portuguese became more complete.

Typically phrases like this can be found here, and yes you can make a difference too.
Thanks,
GerardM

Malafaya had an itch

2009-01-23T15:13:00.001-08:00

OmegaWiki suffered for quite some time from a missing functionality. Its annotations had gone away. This was really frustrating. Especially because nobody was looking after the maintenance of the OmegaWiki mark I database. This annoyance became too much and Malafaya started to look into the code. He found and fixed the problem.

Apparently it felt really good, and as there was this other annoyance, he had another look at the code. The trick will be to get the code in SVN. Once it is in SVN, updating OmegaWiki should not be a problem.
Thanks,
GerardM

Words I do not know

2008-12-21T06:25:00.000-08:00

I read and write a lot of English. Every now and again I come across a word, an idiom I do not know. When I have the time I add them to OmegaWiki. When I look at the ones I added today, fecklessness, valedictory, fricassee and enunciate, I wonder if these are the kind of words other people are looking for as well.
Thanks,
GerardM

Usage

2008-11-28T01:23:00.001-08:00

Some words that you look up in a dictionary, have a particular usage associated with it that is not always apparant. The word Balkans for instance is always preceded with "the" when it is used as a noun. The same is true for the Ivory Coast..

This new type of annotation was requested because people wanted to indicate the difference in usage between words that were otherwise synonymous.

Thanks,

GerardM

Spanish at 30.000 expressions

2008-11-05T05:47:00.000-08:00

Today I am proud to announce that Ascander added the thirty thousandth Spanish expression in OmegaWiki.
Thanks,
GerardM

The beauty of words

2008-11-02T03:56:00.000-08:00

Last Friday [[nl:Afshin Afkari]], presented his Dutch Persian idiom dictionary. The publisher, Amsterdam University Press organised a dialogue with Ashin and Hugo Brandt Corstius in Spui27 in Amsterdam titled "the beauty of words". Going to presentations like this is something that I do rarely. It was however great fun particularly because of the people that you meet at such occasions.

When you read a book like this, you can enjoy a great print. It really looks good. In a book that contains both Latin script and the Perso-Arabic script, it takes more effort to achieve this. One of the things that Afshin included was the transscription of the Persia texts in Eurofarsi. This seems to me a smart move as it a great aid for people who learn Persian. Eurofarsi I am told is used quite a lot by people on the Internet and by people who SMS.

The exposure to Afshin's book made me think on how I would include idiom in OmegaWiki. When you have an idiom in a language, it has a meaning. The question is how do you deal with translations. When you think of it, there are two issues: there is idiom with the same meaning and, there is the need for a literal translation of the text.

It seems to me that you should treat idiom different from normal lexical content. Leaving it a DefinedMeaning without translations but with annotations to equivalent idiom, a defintion of the meaning and literal translations of the idiom itself. Idiom often has a few key words, eg in "blood is thicker then water" you would like to refer to both blood and water. Controry to what is usual in OmegaWiki, you want to refer to these concepts in the same language as the idiom.

The question is, how to support this in OmegaWiki mark II.
Thanks,
GerardM

Fourtythousand DefinedMeanings

2008-10-30T07:52:00.000-07:00

Having 40.000 DefinedMeanings is a nice milestone. The graphic shows how the number of expressions per language tails off.

Congratulations to all the people who contributed to this success. :)
Thanks,
GerardM

French has over 20K expressions

2008-10-28T02:41:00.000-07:00

I expect that with 20k French starts to become relevant as a resource in OmegaWiki. The good news for our users is the amount of translations a concepts is connected to. Currently the ratio is 9,0402 Expressions per DefinedMeaning.

A big thank you to everyone who contributed to the French success :)
Thanks,
GerardM

MySQL Workbench Beta program

2008-10-14T23:50:00.000-07:00

SUN, is working on improving the MySQL workbench designer. We have been using workbench for OmegaWiki mark II and have been asking questions and making suggestions. It is with some satisfaction, that we find that we have been invited to the MySQL workbench beta program.

Currently our software uses some 30 business rules and these amount to some 6000 lines of code. They model a complex dynamic behaviour that is responsible for most on the "work behind the scenes". These triggers are currently not modelled by workbench, that can contain them, but not describe their behaviour from the analyst's point of view.

We are happy and satisfied being part of this program.
Thanks,
GerardM

A Commons that supports multiple languages

2008-10-13T04:45:00.000-07:00

Commons is great, it is the biggest resource of freely usable media files, some 3.363.734 of them. They are a great resource when you are looking for pictures and when you know English. If you do not know English, it might as well not exist.

Given that the Wikimedia Foundation cares about its educational value for everyone, it makes sense for Commons to be used by people who read and write other languages as well. This dream of supporting all the other people as well is an old one; I wrote about it as early as May 2005.

With support of the Digitale Pioniers, we have been enabled to create a proof of concept project. This project does demonstrate that we can do this. The languages that are currently supported are only a few but sufficient to demonstrate the principles.

The issue is that it is for the Wikimedia Foundation to show an interest. There is a growing group of people who have seen that it can do. When I give presentations about this people indicate that this is a "must have" feature. I will talk again at the Wikimedia Conferentie NL and I hope to discuss with the WMF soon what it takes to support multiple languages at Commons but more importantly if it wants to.
Thanks,
Gerard

Wikiprofessional is doing Portuguese

2008-09-17T11:52:00.000-07:00

One function of Wikiprofessional that I really like is the Concept Web Linker. If you have not played with it, you should. What I am really happy with is that the Concept Web Linker is getting into other languages. I have an example of this..

This is the screen dump.
Thanks,
GerardM

Commons but now multi lingual

2008-09-11T23:09:00.000-07:00

This is the category "Felis silvestris catus" as it is on Commons with a twist. This screen makes best sense when you can read Dutch.. Obviously, the English text is still there but that does only helps when you understand that language.

Thanks,

GerardM

OmegaWiki goes Squeak

2008-08-28T00:04:00.000-07:00

OmegaWiki was implemented in MediaWiki as an extension during its first iteration. At that time this was a great decision. It provided us with a lot of great functionality and it was the environment that we knew. MediaWiki is a wonderful collaborative application. In OmegaWiki mark II we are looking for other things; this has led to making OmegaWiki independent from MediaWiki.

OmegaWiki intended to do everything in one database. This meant that it was problematic to use our data for other purposes. We also had a situation where different applications wanted their specific data included in the database and needed control of the data involved. This could not be done in the first iteration of OmegaWiki so we had to rethink our ways.

As data may be connected and often will be shared, a peering model is required. Data will be used by many applications and consequently the data needs to be provided in a way that allows for many applications. For the data we will have one interface that uses a standard XML interface to provide the data. This will allow for many applications to use the same data and it will prevent the mixing of data and user interface elements as we saw in the past.

There will no longer be only one database; there will be many. The central or “global” database will provide basic information that will be CC-by licensed. This will allow anybody to have their own “regional” or “local” data and refer to shared concepts for instance for sharing or mapping purposes.

Regional and local databases can be licensed and maintained in a manner that makes sense to the people involved. They can include data that is not really acceptable from a pure linguistic point of view, for instance MALARIA as a synonym for malaria. They can include all kinds of relations between concepts, relations that may be really specialised or that require particular validations before they are published.

Another application that we have always wanted to give our data was was the OLPC and equivalent networks. This means that our database has to be able to function stand alone and be synchronised and share improved data when a connection becomes available.

As a consequence of all these considerations, we have been looking for the best technology that will serve our purpose; MySQL 5.1 will provide us with new functionality that makes an important difference. Squeak is a programming platform that we think will provide us with the tools to build the rich environment that we dream of having.

As the OLPC project also uses Squeak, it will allow us to bring our information to this great educational project, and in return we hope that people will find OmegaWiki an environment to contribute their Squeak work to and help us build dictionaries in the many languages spoken and written where the OLPC will become available.

Thanks,
GerardM

Fast and furious

2008-06-17T10:33:00.002-07:00

I just learned that OmegaWiki mark II has been updated; it now allows for multiple statements. Bèrto indicated that he will update the documentation to reflect this.. The example code I have does not get posted because the Blogger software wants to interpret it ...

I am sure that it will find its place in the documentation ... So, it is for you to RTFM :)
Thanks,"
GerardM

OmegaWiki mark II

2008-06-17T09:51:00.000-07:00

It has been relatively silent around OmegaWiki, this silence however is very deceptive. Much hard work has gone into preparing for a new codebase for OmegaWiki. The new code has to deliver new functionality in order to justify the huge investment in time and money.

Why change..

The existing user interface and the database routines are very much etwined, we want to separate them
We want to provide services based on the OmegaWiki data, we will provide an XML interface into the data
The underlying technology has changed a lot; we are using the bleeding edge of the MySQL database
Our data can be used for applications; we will provide a way to separate data that is of general interest and data that is not
For some applications it is really helpful when the data can be used in an off-line environment; we will provide a way of synchronising databases
There is more ...

The first data in the OmegaWiki Mark-II environment is now available. It is converted data from OmegaWiki; it is the DefinedMeanings with a SynTrans record in English.. You can find it here.

At the bottom you find a document explaining about the API; it is written in the Open Office format..

Enjoy, have fun and tell us what you think of it. The data is experimental so we will replace it with more data at a later time.
Thanks,
Gerard

Internationalisation and localisation

2008-06-08T01:30:00.000-07:00

When you write software, when the software is to be used by people who speak many languages, internationalisation is a key requirement. It is the precursor to localisation; the changes made by the localisers to support their language.

MediaWiki is really good at localisation and, it is being perfected all the time. When software is written and when internationalisation / localisation is not considered from the start, it is quite a job to get this right.

The OmegaWiki Vocabulary Trainer needed internationalisation / localisation badly. The first issue with the software; it was not German. The software was paid by the University of Bamberg to be used by its students. These students are expected to know German and this trainer is a tool to aid them to learn languages. OmegaWiki is very much dedicated to making information available in many languages and not considering internationalisation in its associated software is ... odd.

It is with relief that I can now announce that the Vocabulary trainer is supported in Betawiki. I am grateful to the kind developers at Betawiki who made this possible. You can localise for your language here ...
Thanks,
GerardM

Getting a better look and feel ..

2008-06-03T05:38:00.000-07:00

The vocabulary trainer was introduced... It looked awful; it now has been improved considerably. Like we wrote last time, it is open source and it is being worked on. One of the things on the "must have" details .... localisation :)
Thanks,
GerardM

Publish early, publish often ...

2008-05-29T13:47:00.001-07:00

For Open Source software, one of the mantras is to publish early and publish often. In this spirit I am happy to announce the first version of a vocabulary trainer on OmegaWiki.

This software uses the content of OmegaWiki; so the quality of the exercise is also determined by the amount of terminology that is contained in OmegaWiki.. The current functionality is not yet feature complete.. One of the things we want to do with this software is have a list of words and phrases that are good to know when you go abroad.. Wikimania 2008 anyone ??

NB the vocabulary trainer can be accessed from the OmegaWiki main page :)

Thanks,
GerardM

Georgian

2008-04-16T23:46:00.000-07:00

Georgian is a language that started with no content in OmegaWiki. It is spoken by some 4.4 million people mainly in Georgia, Turkey, Iran and Russia. It is written in the Georgian alphabet.

Statistics are in and off themselves not that relevant but they do allow you to tell a story. OmegaWiki started with the content of GEMET, the GEneral Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus, the languages that are part of this resource have a head start in size.

Today thanks to the hard work of Sopho, Georgian is the first language that grew bigger then one of the languages supported by Gemet. The OmegaWiki statistics show that Japanese might be the next language to grow bigger then Slovenian..

Because of the beautiful characters, Georgian is my favourite example of showing the value of the localisation in OmegaWiki. It is really special to see the same content optimised in such a way. :)
Thanks,
GerardM

Unicode 5.1

2008-04-05T14:23:00.000-07:00

Today I learned that Unicode 5.1 has been released. The information that I received informs me that one major feature will be of particular relevance to Japanese, Chinese and Korean texts by enabling ideographic variation sequences. The linebreaking for Polish and Portuguese hyphenation has been improved. The Indic languages will be happy with improved text segmentation algorithm.

There are 1624 new encoded characters, this includes characters required for Malayam and Myanmar but there are also new characters for the Latin script. New is support for the Cham, Lepcha, Ol Chiki, Rejang, Saurashtra, Sundanese, and Vai scripts.

For the techies, the collation algorithms have been updated to include all the new characters. This has also an effect on contractions like the ch in the Slovak language.

Many of these things have an effect on languages supported in Wikimedia projects. My question is when will we have support for this. Is this a function of the MediaWiki / PHP code and is it also a function of the browser ??
Thanks,
GerardM

OpenStreetMap terminology

2008-03-18T05:13:00.000-07:00

OpenStreetMap for those who do not know the project, is a free editable map of the whole world. Its data is freely licensed, it is build by volunteers and it is very much a work in progress.
OpenStreetMap has its own terminology, and given its origin it is British. The maps can be quite good providing you with sufficient information to plan your route.. There are routes for pubcrawls and other innovations :)

As OpenStreetMap intends to provide a map of the world, the people that make these maps have to literally put themselves on the map. In the Netherlands we have been blessed because maps have been made available to the project. A friend of mine is not yet on the map..
It is clear that the terminology used in Italy is not the same as in the UK or the Netherlands. It makes sense for an Italian to have Italian terminology available to him and Dutch would do me nicely.

At a meeting of the Digitale Pioniers, I met people of OpenStreetMap and we agreed to include their terminology in OmegaWiki. I have now entered the words that have the key "highway" and invite you all to come to OmegaWiki to add translations in your language.

Special in this data is that i have added the definitions provided by OpenStreetMap as alternate definitions as well. In this way they have been marked as definitions provided by OpenStreetMap.

All the OpenStreetMap terminology in OmegaWiki can be found here.
Thanks,
GerardM

Less is more

2008-03-11T13:59:00.000-07:00

There are two types of content in OmegaWiki; there are the standard MediaWiki namespaces with the standard MediaWiki content and there is the OmegaWiki specific content. The specific content contain database records, they are the DefinedMeanings and Expressions.

As they are handled completely differently, it means that the functionality available to these types of data is different as well. Particularly the "move" functionality has given us problems in the past. This broken functionality has now been removed from the screens.
Thanks,
GerardM

Firefox 3 beta 4 is significantly faster

2008-03-11T08:32:00.000-07:00

OmegaWiki is a web application that requires a lot from a system. I am really happy to report that the latest beta of Firefox gives me a significantly better performance on the same hardware. I reported in the past that the Firefox beta did a good job for me, but this time the performance is noticeably faster on a page like Nederland.

Firefox provides cutting edge technology and really makes a big difference to me. Now when you want OmegaWiki to perform even better, you can choose to move to this latest software. The other good news is that the spell checkers that are relevant to me are now available as well...
Thanks,
GerardM

Nagios

2008-03-01T23:35:00.000-08:00

OmegaWiki has a technical problem; there are certain records that have problems and that crash the database. There are solutions to this problem and some are being tested at the moment.

This week I was in Bamberg at the Otto-Friedrich University, and discussed this with Martin Mai. He has now build a monitor that checks if OmegaWiki is still alive. This works fine. We now have permission for the Bamberg Nagios service to run a script when OmegaWiki is no longer alive.

This will solve one of my biggest worries which is the availability of the OmegaWiki service.
Thanks,
GerardM

Bounties for the localisation of MediaWiki

2008-01-16T14:42:00.000-08:00

Hoi,
The "Stichting Open Progress" is happy to announce that it has received a grant from Hivos, to improve the localisation of MediaWiki. Open Progress is going to offer a bounty of up to 200 EURO for the full localisation for a language. Given the activity of Hivos, a Dutch NGO, a bounty will only be available for languages in Asia, Africa and Latin America that have a sizable number of speakers.

With this project we hope to achieve that MediaWiki can indeed claim to be one of the best Open Source projects that provides great localisation for many many languages out of the box. It will improve the usability not only for the WMF projects in that language but also for projects like Wikimedia Commons, Wikieducator, Wikihow, OmegaWiki .. the list goes on ..

The budget we have is substantial but limited. We will be sadly happy when we have to announce that we have ran out of money. Sad because we want to localise more languages, happy because so many languages will have been improved.

For the precise details of the project I refer to the details on Betawiki.

NB The amounts are inclusive of the money transfer costs and as these can be substantial, we offer some alternatives. In the past I have proposed a scheme called "Donations, putting your money where your mouth is". In this scheme you choose to get paid or donate the money for one of the projects that we advertise under this scheme. Another way of getting the money paid is when people in a country agree to work together and have us pay the money together as well. This could for instance work in the case of Wikimedia India...

Thanks,
GerardM

2008, International Year of Languages

2008-01-01T10:22:00.000-08:00

The new year, 2008 has been designated the International Year of Languages by UNESCO. Countries and organisations are invited to participate, and I think that what we do in our projects qualifies us as participants. Our projects are relevant for many languages, we welcome new languages and we provide help and infrastructure to make it a success. Our communities are knowledge societies in which everyone can participate and benefit. We promote universal access to information and ensure in this way the use of an increasing number of languages.

Siebrand wrote an overview of the localisation of MediaWiki. Real support is provided to some 170 languages but only 47 have a minimal localisation. In a way it mirrors our projects; our projects do great in some languages while at the other end language versions are closed because there is not enough of a community that supports them.

The Wikimedia Foundation is becoming more mature; we aim to ensure that all our projects do well. Barriers to entry have been in place for new languages and it has led to improved localisation of MediaWiki. When new projects are finally approved, they are already of a size both in articles and participants that there is less need for anxiety for their future.

When we are to participate in the Year of Languages and continue to do what we do well and improve where we are weak, our projects will prove to be credible participants in this Year of Languages. Participating will give our Wiki way more credibility and it will give us access to people and organisations that can help us in fulfilling our goal; sharing the sum of all knowledge with every single human being.

Thanks,
GerardM

Numbers in a translation dictionary

2007-12-30T07:48:00.000-08:00

In the Wikimedia Foundation, there are the inclusionists and the exclusionists. Some are of the opinion that certain topics should not be included in Wikipedia while others do. The most brilliant example is the inclusion of all the busstops in Japan. Someone took the effort to describe them and people find them actually useful.

Some people are enamoured by constructed languages and spend a lot of time making such languages their own. I personally have had dealings with at least three people that speak Volapük, and I know people that go to congresses because they meet people who speak Esperanto. Many constructed languages have more speakers than many natural languages (that are not yet extinct).

For exclusionists it is not palatable when constructed languages do well. There are always "good" reasons why those others need to be excluded. Hidden in the discussion about the "radical cleanup of the Volapük Wikipedia" is a discussion about the inclusion of numerals like 588 in the Limburgian Wiktionary and as you can imagine "it is not good".

In a translation dictionary there are reasons to include numbers. The point is that they are not written the same in all scripts. OmegaWiki has its fair share of numbers, and it did not address this issue.

By adding a new class, we now allow the representation of Arab and Roman numbers, and hundred has now as an annotation both 100 and C. In this way we do not have a separate page for each numerical representation.

Thanks,
GerardM

Languages ...

2007-12-18T02:29:00.000-08:00

Given a fixed point and you can move the world. In many ways, your language provides you with the tools to wrap your mind around the world, express its essence in a way that may be understood by the people you communicate with and help you to shape the world as you know it.

Language is both individual and shared. My English has been shaped by my schooling in the Netherlands, my stay in the United Kingdom and the many times I expressed myself in e-mail, articles, presentations and when skyping. Typically I get it right but a text can be understood by some and misunderstood by others. It is my English but to function it has to be expressed in a way that is shared with others.

For some subjects I prefer my native language, for others I prefer English. To communicate, the language used must be sufficiently shared by everyone involved. The language must be received; when I am surrounded by a vacuum, nobody will hear me talk. To read this blog, you either have access to a computer or someone must print it out for you.

A language lives when people use it, when it is part of a distinct community, a distinct culture. When the boundaries around such a community or culture disappear 0r change, the language either morphs or it dies. To understand history, you have to understand its artefacts and its language. Many languages die and died and with it we lose the history, the culture of the people that spoke that language. They may leave their literature, inscriptions and when enough is left, we may understand what is says. The trick will be to understand it as it was meant when the language, the culture was alive.
Thanks,
GerardM

Whe needs birthPlace

2007-12-15T01:58:00.000-08:00

With some regularity I try to better understand Semantic Web and associated subjects. I find it hard going but also a compulsive subject. When you express the relation "Johan Cruijff" "birthPlace" "Amsterdam", it is understandable to you as a reader but for humans it should read like "Johan Cruijf was born in Amsterdam" or "Johan Cruijf werd geboren in Amsterdam" .. This magical statement "birthPlace" can be interpreted when you know your English otherwise it is truly for machines only.

OmegaWiki does express relations, you will find for instance that Amsterdam is the capital of the Netherlands. In essence it is expressed as a triple, but it is expressed in natural language and depending on the existence of a translation, you will read the relation in the language selected as your user preference.

How to combine what we do and what happens elsewhere, my latest idea is based in the RDF tag; "birthPlace". It is a construct that obviously needs a natural language equivalent and this is what OmegaWiki can provide. A method is needed to connect the two. In order to function, birthPlace has a very precise definition and this definition must be part of a collection of such definitions. These labels need to be linked to OmegaWiki DefinedMeanings as the identifier for an OmegaWiki collection.

To make this useful, an external application needs to call a function that provides the translation to a specified language. How to combine this with the notion of an URN I have not figured out yet.

Thanks,
GerardM

Eastern Yiddish

2007-12-13T03:26:00.000-08:00

Eastern Yiddish, is one of the two varieties of Yiddish that have been recognised as languages in their own right in the ISO-639-3 (ydd). in OmegaWiki, we now have our first 213 Expressions in this language and I am impressed with the amount of work that has gone into it; most have annotations indicating hyphenation and the pronunciation using IPA notation.

Eastern Yiddish is not one of the languages supported by MediaWiki, and the mechanism for showing localised content is connected to the language selected in the "User Preferences". I have been given some help from Siebrand what files need to be changed and added. Kim helped me with doing it for the first time and now the first localisation is visible for Eastern Yiddish.

The MediaWiki localisation itself uses Yiddish as the fall back language so the experience is pretty good for now. What Siebrand indicated is that is is possible to include languages like Eastern Yiddish in the BetaWiki. This would create stubs that are of benefit to OmegaWiki. It would prepare for the moment when people start localising in earnest.

I think it would be a good thing, but I am interested to learn what other people think.

Thanks,
GerardM

Supporting American English

2007-12-03T11:54:00.000-08:00

American- or British English are two variations of the English language. They have substantial differences. They are sufficiently the same and are unlikely be mistaken to be separate languages.

In OmegaWiki, it has been possible to add entries for English; this meant there is no difference between written the different versions of English or you had to specify both versions. Issues like this exist for other languages like Serbian and Mandarin as well.

In the OmegaWiki user interface, languages are considered ISO-639 entities. When a DefinedMeaning for a language is part of the appropriate collection, we use the translations in our user interface. The problem is that all these linguistic entities are needed now and that they are created to make OmegaWiki work.

For the ISO-639-6 there will be issues as the codes we make, using the RFC 4646 methodology, will be replaced. It will also be interesting to learn how in the end everything will be merged together.

In the mean time we now support localisation for these linguistic entities.

Thanks,
GerardM

Sinterklaas present

2007-12-02T09:55:00.000-08:00

In the Netherlands we traditionally do not get presents with Christmas. For us Sinterklaas is celebrated on the fifth or sixth of December. In my family everyone no longer believes in Sinterklaas and consequently we can celebrate it on a more convenient moment like in a weekend.

I have had a wonderful Sinterklaas, and I do want to tell you about the present that Kipcool and Kim gave me. Kipcool wrote this wonderful functionality that show you what classes we have in OmegaWiki and, how many translations we have in your language.

With the new functionality you will see the concepts that are translated in your language. When you check out a concept, you will even find what attributes are available in your language. I have found it to be really addictive. :)

Thanks,
GerardM

New upload functionality

2007-11-19T02:47:00.000-08:00

OmegaWiki is really happy to announce that we have, with thanks to the Otto-Friedrich University of Bamberg, for the first time used new upload functionality. The University of Bamberg has a need for a repository for its Destinazione Italia terminology and has found this in OmegaWiki.

We have uploaded translation in Persian and we have it nicely attributed to the person who did the work. We will upload for several more languages. What is of relevance is that we can make an export for any language, for any collection. So if you are interested to help on our OLPC collectio n.. just drop me a line..

Thanks,
GerardM

Money

2007-10-19T06:28:00.000-07:00

All projects need money to operate. OmegaWiki does need money to operate. We now have made it possible for you to support what we do in a practical way; we now have a link in our sidebar so that you can use Pay Pall to donate money. You can just give us money, you can help us fund a project that we want to do.. Check out our Donations, putting your money where your mouth is ..

Stiching Open Progress is a Dutch "not for profit" organisation and we can use all the money we can get to do all the cool development work we would like to do..

Thanks,
GerardM