#Conceptwiki

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

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

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 ...

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

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

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

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

 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

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

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

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

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

#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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#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

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

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

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)

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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:

1. We only link to Wikipedia and Commons (this is the current situation).
2. We link to as many ontologies as we like, as soon as there is a contributor willing to add links to it.
3. We link to a few ontologies that we consider authoritative or relevant.
   
4. 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.

1. Why only Wikipedia and Commons?
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The beauty of words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 ..

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