Greek languages

At OmegaWiki, we saw that Lou started to change the capitalisation of language names... A few days ago I was surprised that the Georgian names for languages were incorrectly spelled. Now it is Greek.

It is really powerful to see that by having the languages corrected, it will be available for everybody who wants to know about Greek. This reason for using OmegaWiki proves itself again.

Thanks,
GerardM

Latin roots etc.

Well yesterday one thing came into mind - a dictionary a teacher of mine at the language school had. It was a dictionary that listed Latin words with many translations into other languages and one thing is obvious: all these words of course were similar in all languages. If you knew one of them and studied the other language it would have been easy to create the relative words following a set of rules for most of them.

So one thing should be obvious: to insert these words with their translations into OmegaWiki ... but well, there is one problem with Latin - the "normal" Latin language should not be mixed with the taxonomical Latin that is used in science ... so we need to create two languages: Latin and taxonomical Latin ... who knows if the relative language codes exist somewhere in the ISO 639 standards.

Technorati: language, Latin, ISO 639, standards, translation, dictionary

OLPC needs a dictionary viewer

I had a word with the director of content for the OLPC, the One Laptop Per Child Project. As you know OmegaWiki is the project that works on providing the OLPC with dictionary content. We are working on all these words, and while we are making steady progress, there is so much still left to do. We are getting more Expressions in many languages, the definitions are lagging and while we do our best, it is still very much the difference between there being nothing and there being next to nothing. It does however show that things are getting under way...

As the moment when kids are exposed to the systems is drawing closer, it is relevant that the data can be used. So we need a dictionary viewer. It needs to run on Linux and, it should have a small footprint. As we will provide all these languages, it will be interesting to see how the rich tapestry that OmegaWiki tries to weave will materialise on these nifty systems.

When you have a suggestion, please let us know :)

Thanks,
GerardM

Georgian names for languages

In the past I got permission to copy content from a resource with the names of languages. I am still grateful for the data. It got the Dutch Wiktionary going really nicely and, as we needed at the time those names of languages for the user interface.

With OmegaWiki we had the same issue; we needed language names again for the user interface. This was to make it possible for people to see the labels of translations in their own language. From the moment the data became available we have learned a lot, for instance that language in languages like Danish and Italian do not capitalise the names of languages.

Today I was told that many of the names of languages in Georgian were found to be in error and had been corrected. The great news for OmegaWiki is, that we only have to do this once and it is good everywhere. The sad thing is that it is probably wrong in many, many Wiktionaries. There were two types of errors; it was just wrong or it was the name of someone from a country in stead of the name of the language.

The best I can do for the Wiktionaries is notify in this way as I do not really now what needs doing.

Thanks,
GerardM

Stichting Open Progress

Stichting Open Progress is the Dutch not for profit organisation that is the legal organisation behind OmegaWiki. As OmegaWiki is growing to the extend where we have to consider contracts for hosting, grants and the like, we had a need for an organisation.

The need for an organisation was also felt as we already had some projects where we would have been better able to do things when there was a legal entity backing up the activities. Some of these projects are quite substantial.

Open Progress aims to develop both Open Source/Free Software and Open Content/Free Content projects. As part of its mission it gives room for projects that are aligned with the aims of the stichting. Obviously OmegaWiki is the first; from an organisational point of view, the OmegaWiki commission decides on the issues that arise. Resolution will be enacted for the project by the stichting provided they are in line with the Dutch law and, provided they do not circumvent the aims of the stichting. This way Open Progress hopes to make OmegaWiki a safe haven where people and organisations work in the understanding that the aims of the project will be respected.

There are two websites for OpenProgress; in line with the experiences of the Wikimedia Foundation, we have both an internal and an external wiki. The internal will use Semantic MediaWiki to leverage as much as possible the information that we will include. As the information will include both personal information and confidential project information, the internal will be invite only.

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
voorzitter Stichting Open Progress

Destinazione Italia

Destinazione Italia is a project of the University of Bamberg. It provides training for people learning an advanced level of Italian. Bamberg is a German University and many of its students are German. Many of the students do have a different mother tongue. Learning a third language based on the knowledge of a second language is less effective than learning based on the knowledge of the mother tongue.

I am really proud to announce that OmegaWiki has been selected by the University of Bamberg as the platform that will host the lexicological information for "Destinazione Italia". The initial phase of the project will create a lot of Italian based DefinedMeanings. In the second phase we will translate these words to English, German and Spanish. The third phase is to find translations in as many other languages as we can get.

Research done by Zdenek Broz learned, that when the combination of quality translations of German, English and Spanish is found, it will allow the inclusion of translations of other languages when these translations are shared in a different resource. According to Zdenek's figures this will get us an accuracy of around, probably better than 95%.

There is a budget to get us many translations in other languages. The sweet thing is, when we are able to provide quality translations, the budget can be used for other things. This can be to improve the OmegaWiki usability, it can also be to spend money on a language that is not part of the initial list of languages "Destinazione Italia" supports.

The challenge is therefore, how much can we do with a limited budget. What will be the added value of creating content in a Wiki environment. When will OmegaWiki reach the tipping point where collaboration in OmegaWiki is the obvious thing to do, "Destinazione Italia" will help us reach that point. :)

Thanks,
GerardM

Alexa and statistics again

As you may know, Alexa is a company that tries to divine the relative ranking of one website when it comes to traffic. It uses some functionality that is associated with the Internet Explorer browser. This is a browser that comes standard with the Windows operating system and it used to be absolutely dominate the global market. This market was eroded by the Firefox browser, Firefox has carved out a niche for itself and has a worldwide use of more than 15 percent.

The distribution of the use is different from country to country; in Germany Firefox is much more popular. The distribution is also different from website to website; for OmegaWiki a big percentage of people use Firefox; in November the traffic from both browsers was evenly split. This means that the reporting of Alexa has a bias that severely affects its accuracy.

For OmegaWiki Alexa provides the best statistics we currently can provide you with. We have a technical issue that limits the usefulness of our webaliser statistics. Because of the name change from WiktionaryZ, you do find that there are separate OmegaWiki and WiktionaryZ statistics at Alexa.. I wrote them about it, and Alexa will merge the data in one to two weeks.

Any way, better statistics in two weeks, both from Alexa and from our webaliser. It will be interesting to see more realistically if and to what extend our traffic is evolving.

Thanks,
GerardM

Relation types

OmegaWiki includes one thesaurus at the moment. The GEMET thesaurus was a boon, having it demonstrated really well that what was then WiktionaryZ is able to include a thesaurus and does a good job showing relations.

The next step will be to demonstrate that we can reliably include multiple thesauri. This is a lot more complicated. The problem has to do with the relation types used and what they mean. The issue is that you cannot infer that what is meant by a particular phrase like "is part of" in one thesaurus means the same in an other.

This means that you have to tread carefully. The first thing that you can do is treat a collection as a self contained unit. The relation types would as a consequence be only available and applicable to those DefinedMeanings that are part of the collection.

When a collection is to be integrated, there will be a need to merge those DefinedMeanings that are conceptually the same. This may merge pre existing relations and collection relations. In effect this may demonstrate that certain relation types are indeed the same and consequently the collection relations may now get a relation type that is of an higher level.

The higher level relations are based on domains. You will agree with me that only organisms include proteins. The consequence is that both parts of such a relation will have to be either an organism or a protein.

The last level would be the universal relation types. They will be true never mind the domain. Currently ALL relation types can be universally applied. The current GEMET relation types will not remain that way. They will prove to be quite arbitrary and I expect that we will at some stage restrict their usage. This will likely be offset by functionality that will offset the pain of losing a tool that is quiet popular.

Thanks,
GerardM

IPA or the International Phonetic Alphabet

I woke up having dreamt of OmegaWiki. I had a brainwave; it is easy to include IPA into OmegaWiki. I sprinted out of bed, asked Leftmost if it could be done, it could and then I started to look into IPA for the first time. I have started reading and I do admit understanding the text is beyond me. Some facts that can be found:

• IPA has approximately 107 base symbols and 55 modifiers.
• There is a specific chart for the sounds of English.
• Different resources use IPA in different ways.
• There are even different symbols used for British English :(
  

The observation that I always made was that on the English Wiktionary there is one "broad" IPA transcription. And, it is also made clear that the English language publications "cheat" to make it better understandable for people who already speak English.

The result is that, yes we can enter IPA transcriptions when we enable it. The problem however is that we should not allow IPA transcriptions optimised for the English speakers. OmegaWiki is to be used by people with ANY language as a background.

I think that before we enable IPA transcriptions there should be some more discussion.

Thanks,
GerardM

Tiny Winy Buggy Bugs ... that take loads of time to explain ...

Every now and again I have that situation ... I send people to OmegaWiki or before WiktionaryZ and they tell me: but the dictionary is completely wrong ... the reason?

Well there is that already known bug where you have a wrong page title like here with the title heavy having the contents for small. In the meantime I explained it more and more often ... all this takes time - the first impression we give when people look at such pages is: OmegaWiki is full of errors - even simple stuff seems to be wrong. They don't know that this is a bug and I am wondering how many went away being deluded by our product.

Is it so difficult to get this fixed? How valuable is our time that we need to explain the same thing over and over again?

Well: for sure it must be done before going officially live, otherwise our credibility will be very much questioned and we will need loads of hours to explain the same bug over and over again.

Thanks!

When a year ends, it is an opportune time to reflect and to look forward. The past year was pretty amazing; WiktionaryZ went from nothing but a proof of concept to OmegaWiki with functionality that includes language depended part of speech annotation. I want to express gratitude to all the people that made this possible, I want to particularly thank Knewco for their growing belief and understanding what Open Source, Open Content and Open Access. They have not only been instrumental in the development of OmegaWiki, my prediction is that their contribution will help the evolution immensely in the thinking how to make all this sustainable.

OmegaWiki is very much an experiment; it brings organisations and communities together. In the development of OmegaWiki we have seen how immensly valuable both are. It is because of this that I find it so disappointing that the Wikimedia Foundation finds it so difficult to entertain the possibilities that such cooperation brings.

As the WMF decided that they were not in a position to host OmegaWiki, we are now in a position with Open Progress, the Dutch not for profit organisation we had to set up, to do things different where we think it makes a difference. This notion of "eating our own dog food" has always been an important part of the way OmegaWiki works; in the same way we hope to implement the ideas that we agree on in our community.

The most important notion of OmegaWiki is in its definition of success; "success is when people find an application for our data that we did not think of". The implication is that the data of OmegaWiki is there to be used and that collaboration is what OmegaWiki is about. Collaboration in a way that recognises that the success of OmegaWiki is integral to the success of everyone who helps OmegaWiki to be a success.

Technically OmegaWiki is near the turning point where we have sufficient capability to host several ontologies together. This will coincide with the arrival of "collection relation types" and "domain relation types". With the arrival of language dependent attributes we are on the threshold of being able to include the information that differentiates one linguistic entity from another.

Both these two capabilities will be really important in 2007. They will bring a lot of relevant data to OmegaWiki and is likely to bring relevance to the project. I envision that we will indicate which UNICODE characters make up the standard characters for a language. It will show among other things where more characters are needed, it will also help define what the proper sorting order is for a linguistic entity.

In a mail to the Yahoo aphrophonewikis group, Don Osborn asked for a "Year of Unicode in Africa", I hope that OmegaWiki will help make this happen. In a mail to the Wiktionary mailing list, Javier Carro suggest to collaborate on what he calls "Schemes". Both are two mails of the last week, I expect the implementation of both will be feasible.

I am sure 2007 will be great .. Prosit Neujahr :)

Thanks,
GerardM

Relevancy

Today it was in the news that Saddam Hussein was executed. He was no choir boy, there was a trial. Many people are happy with his death, many people are unhappy with his death. I do not want to express my opinion; it is not relevant.

With occasions like this, it is important that the words that can be associated with such an event are understood and available in resources like OmegaWiki. The words that are in news items are the words that need to be explained. The figures as they exist for Wikipedia show that the articles that are most visited are to do with sex, sport and news. I expect that this is also true for a dictionary. There are no statistics that I am aware of.

The word of the day for tomorrow could be gallows but I think that such a word on the last day of the year is a bit much.. Justice is much more appropriate.

Thanks,
GerardM

A flurry of activities

With the new part of speech functionality, OmegaWiki sees a lot of activity of another kind. For the first languages some of the parts of speech have been indentified. The system is by necessity laborious; all the parts of speech have to be identified for all languages because we do not assume that a particular part of speech exists in a language.

Siebrand did a lot of work on identifying the parts of speech for the Dutch language. As a consequence we do not only have the "verb" but also the "copula". The idea is that when people know how to identify a verb as a verb, they can and may. When someone is able to identify more precisely, they can. In the mean time, when we get functionality for inflecting verbs, it should work on both.

Having functionality come on-line in small bytes, is in line with the motto of Open Source/Free Software; publish often. It really helps. I can imagine the many refinements and expansions on what we have at the moment. It is relevant to realize that our software is still very much pre-alpha. It is not complete, but it demonstrates how the functionality is growing making our dream a reality.

Thanks,
GerardM

It is the night before Christmas

On the night before Christmas many people are full of anticipation of the presents that Christmas will bring. For OmegaWiki, we hope / expect that we will be able to have part of speech support. The software has been coded. The waiting is for the final touches and to see it enabled in OmegaWiki. Leftmost does a sterling job for us..

In order to get here, many hurdles were taken. First there was a need to have default behaviour. This led to the sample sentence functionality. With the part of speech functionality, we can have a list of values, we have functionality that is dependent on the language it applies to.

With the implementation of the functionality, there will be a need to identify what parts of speech exist in a language. This meta data needs boot strapping, so we hope people will add the parts of speech to the languages they know well. We hope that they do this well because correcting meta data is problematic.

عيد الميلاد السعي geseënde kerfees Sretan Božić Καλά Χριστούγεννα

Thanks,
GerardM

OmegaWiki now supports Cebuano

Cebuano is one of the languages spoken in the Philippines. Some 20 million people speak it as their first language and some 11 million speak it as a second language. It is good that Cebuano is now enabled for editing.

There is a Wikipedia in Cebuano, as far as I can tell it has been localised in MediaWiki. This means that when the names of languages are translated, OmegaWiki will start to look attractive for the people who speak Cebuano.

Out of interest I checked if Open Office supports Cebuano. Googling learns that people use OO in Cebuan, but there is no official localisation for Cebuano and there isn't one for Tagalog either. Open Office does not support many languages and it will be hard work to get the user interface localised in more languages.

This does however not mean that Open Office cannot create content in Cebuano. Of importance is that OO is able to indicate what language people use. It is not clear to me how to do this; it seems that OO only allows for the use of languages that it fully supports. This is in my opinion not the way to approach it.

If Open Office allows for people to select the languages that they edit in, and the languages are everything that ISO-639-3 supports that is written, it should be possible for people to select the user interface that suits them best and even allow for the use of spell checkers that are created for these languages. With the correct tagging that is implicit in using the language tags, it will become easier to support the documents that are produced because it is then possible to explicitly know what language a text is in.

The questions for me are:

• Is my analysis correct .. please tell me it is not ..
• How to convince the OO people to support the use of all recognised languages that can be written
• Get support for spell checking in those languages as well.

Thanks,
GerardM

The use of Standards to emancipate languages

More and more languages are supported by the localisation efforts of projects like Open Office. This has a major effect on the emancipation of these languages; much content is written and some of it ends up on the Internet. When it gets there, its information is often lost because it cannot be found by a user who is not sophisticated in the use of search engines. Sophistication is needed because Google currently only recognises 100 languages and only 15% of the content of the World Wide Web is tagged to indicate a language and much of it is tagged incorrectly. When the quality of the tagging is improved, it will be possible for search engines to provide information that is only in the requested language. This will have the added benefit that a growing corpus of content will become available and this in turn will stimulate the research in these languages.

OmegaWiki is a wiki based website that aims to provide information both of a lexical, terminological and ontological nature. It does this by extending the MediaWiki software with relational functionality. OmegaWiki aims to have all words in all languages.

In order to learn what languages exist, OmegaWiki adopted the ISO-639-3 standard. This leaves out many linguistic entities like dialects and orthographies. OmegaWiki has had the good fortune that it got into contact with the WLDC and GeoLang who are the organisations that deal with the ISO-639-6 standard that is under development. Together with the WLDC it has been proposed to the ISO task group to use the environment and the functionality that OmegaWiki provides to gather the data that is needed to learn about the different linguistic entities. This has been accepted by the task force at the LSGB conference in Vienna.

Much of the groundwork has now been done, the next step is to make this functional. To make it functional, we want to have software adopt the existing standards and the information provided in OmegaWiki. This is feasible for Open/Free software. We have already approached the OmegaT lead developer and, he will be happy to support this because it will make OmegaT more relevant. Because of what OmegaWiki aims to do, we will be able to build spell-checkers for linguistic entities on a regular basis, this in turn will have an impact on the standardisation and the emancipation of languages.

With the emancipation of languages, it will become increasingly an option to bring information to people in their native languages. Studies have shown that this leads to a much better understanding and appreciation of services provided. Particularly in what is called, the long tail of the language industry, there has been little support for any of the standards. Consequently the quality of service provided when translating for languages in the long tail are inconsistent. By developing the tools to include the support for any linguistic entities, it will become possible to use these languages for written communications, it will also become possible to raise the quality of these communications by applying the work that has been done in the language industry.

To make this project take off, it works best when many people and organisations collaborate. All of them will have their own reasons to want to be included. The challenge will be to coordinate things in such a way that all the necessary parts are realised.

There are sufficient reasons for many organisations to buy into this project. What is needed is not only to leverage this but also to explore how the data that is gathered, the functionality that is build can be extended to provide additional information that is of relevance to the project. Many organisations will have a need for information, we will want either their active participation and / or their support. We will find all types of technical complications, we need the buy in of the people that can resolve these issues.

All in all, it will take a lot of effort to provide the difference that we aim for.
Thanks,
GerardM

WiktionaryZ becomes OmegaWiki

The OmegaWiki project aims to provide information about all words of all languages with a user interface in all languages. It achieves this by using relational database technology extending the wiki paradigm. This project attracted attention from organizations that made the development of relational database technology from inside the MediaWiki software possible.

OmegaWiki originated from the 171 Wiktionary projects of the Wikimedia Foundation. Originally the project was called "Ultimate Wiktionary" it was renamed to "WiktionaryZ" and now it will be known as OmegaWiki to prevent confusion with its Wiktionary sister projects.

The OmegaWiki project will include specialist terminology and will have an ontological component that will allow for the inclusion of specialist thesauri. Due to the experimental nature and to some of the requirements make that the Wikimedia Foundation is not in a position to host the OmegaWiki project.

To allow for the further development and hosting of the OmegaWiki project, the Stichting Open Progress, a foundation based under Dutch law, will assume the responsibility for the project. The "WiktionaryZ commission" will continue to take care of the day-to-day issues for the OmegaWiki project and, it will be renamed to "OmegaWiki commission"

The content of OmegaWiki will continue to be licensed under a combined GFDL and CC-by license. This is to enable what the project has defined as success: "success is when someone finds an application for our data that we did not think of".

The Wikimedia Foundation and Stichting Open Progress will continue to work together to achieve their shared objective; to bring information to all people of this planet. For more information:
We hope and expect that the Wikimedia Foundation and Stichting Open Progress will be able to work together to achieve their shared objective; to bring information to all people of this planet.

For the Stichting Open Progress and the OmegaWiki committee,
Gerard Meijssen

First post

This is the first post for this blog. It is created as a consequence of the name change of the WiktionaryZ project. For information that went before, please have a look at the WiktionaryZ blog.

Thanks,
GerardM