#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