Some more on Wolof

OmegaWiki wants to support all words of all languages and, it does not want to go into the issue of does this language exist or not. We make use of the ISO 639 standards and, when we feel like being adventurous, we look at what is recognised in the IANA language tags.

Deferring to standard organisations means that you take what they say as the "truth". It does not mean that we necessarily agree, but it saves us from a lot of mayhem. Yesterday I wrote about the first native Wolof speaker for OmegaWiki. Today Ibou changed the definition for Wolof and included Gambia as a country where Wolof is spoken. According to the description by Ethnologue of the Wolof language this is not the case. They do refer to another language, Gambian Wolof, this description makes it clear that Wolof is spoken in the Gambia as well.

The article on Wikipedia on Wolof is in my opinion wrong; it gives the impression that the ISO-639-1 and the ISO-639-2 codes are split into two. This is contrary to how standards work. When a language is split into two, the original meaning will stand as it is, it will get a new description to indicate that it has been split and two new codes will be created.

So Ethnologue is inconsistent. Ibou is probably right. I have send an e-mail to Ethnologue and I hope that they will amend their fine resource so that we will know for sure that he is right. :)

Thanks,
GerardM

One new user

Sometimes a new user is special. To me Ibou is special. He is the first Wolof native speaker on OmegaWiki. He is the first person where I have been told for whom communicating in English will be difficult.

I could not be more happy with what he has done so far; he created the Babel templates for Wolof. He has translated the first part of the main menu. Really, he makes the next Wolof speakers feel welcome..

Thanks,
GerardM

Localisation of OmegaWiki

What makes OmegaWiki so special, is that the presentation of the data is shown in the language selected in the user preferences. The data is sorted properly. It is really nice.

In the next version of the software, it will be possible to localise the headers as well. These are currently in English only. In contrast to how the localisation is done, the headers will be system messages. In this way each Wikis for Professionals can choose the headers that provide the best fit for its application.

Thanks,
GerardM

30.000 Expressions for English in the Community Database

The word "Southern Sierra Miwok" is a language particular to California. In 1994 there were still 7 people that spoke this language. According to the UMLS, the name of the language is Meewoc and as Ethnologue provides it as one of the alternate names, it was possible to link this DefinedMeaning in the Community Database with the concept in the UMLS.

With 30.000 Expressions, there are many that also exist in the UMLS Authoritative Database. The UMLS has some 1.93 million Expression at the moment, and the first 200+ DefinedMeanings have already been linked. They are mainly US-American languages and chemical elements with an occasional animal like guinea pig thrown in for good measure.

It is relevant to have the concept linked. It means that the information in one database can be seen as supplementary to what is available in another database. Currently we have three databases, but when you consider how they are structured, there are implicit connections known as many of the concepts known in the UMLS are also known in the Swiss-Prot database. The only thing left doing is making them explicit. :)

Thanks,
GerardM

UMLS

The UMLS or Unified Medical Language System is a collection of many resources it contains tools, a semantic network and a specialist lexicon. It is also a collection of many resources. These resources all have their own license and copyright. Effectively much of the UMLS can be used for many purposes because the particular license allows it. In the same way, there is much of the UMLS that can only be used when the copyright holder gives permission.

In OmegaWiki, we have our first Authoritative Database online. It is the UMLS and we are proud of it. Now as the UMLS is this collection of connected resources, we present it in the same way. There is one UMLS as an Authoritative Database and it has collections that are the parts that make up the UMLS as we have it. The important thing of the UMLS is that it did make the connection between the different databases and we do use their system to connect.

What makes the inclusion of the UMLS so special is that we have the cooperation of the NLM. It is what makes this such an exciting experiment.

Thanks,
GerardM

IL7R-alpha and IL2R-alpha anyone ?

The OmegaWiki database is blocked for editing at the moment. The reason given is: "Importing new data". For me this is great news. It means that we are importing the data that we have been preparing for a long time. It means that we are closer to getting the first Wiki for Professionals life.

Today, on the BBC-news website there is an article where IL7R-alpha and IL2R-alpha play a major role. They are proteins, more specific they are genetic variants of proteins that play a role in the expression of multiple sclerosis.

OmegaWiki will contain terminology like IK7R-alpha, it is specialised terminology but as it can be found in sources like the BBC website, it is good to have it. Wikiproteins will be the first Wiki for Professionals and, it will allow for the further annotation of these proteins by people who know about these substances.

It is really thrilling to see all the development needed to come to a first public outing come to a close. I congratulate the members of the consortium that make Wikiproteins possible. I believe that this has the potential to become an important tool for scientists. Wikiproteins is possible because of the many people who believe that Open Access is essential to science.

By going life, we invite comments. These will help us to make sure that the functionality is just right. The best people that can help us identify what more needs to be done are the people who will become part of what will be the Wikiproteins community.

The "official" announcement of Wikiproteins going life is scheduled at Wikimania 2007 :)

Thanks,
GerardM

DMM - Swahili content for OmegaWiki

Yesterday, I reintroduced the notion of "Donations, putting your money where your mouth is" on this blog. Today I want to tell you about one of the first such projects.

The Kamusi project is a really important project to create a dictionary for Swahili. The project was a project of Yale University and Martin Benjamin was its editor. The project is probably one of the most important resources for the Swahili language and it is therefore really sad that the activity of this project came to an end because of a lack of funding.

Martin is preparing a new project for African languages called PALDO or the Pan-African Living Online Dictionary. This project aims to create content in many of the important African languages. Martin has been given permission to use the content of the Kamusi project from Yale. This means that it becomes possible for him to collaborate with other projects as well.

It is with pride and gratitude that I can say that PALDO and OmegaWiki are going to work together. This means that we need to get the content of Kamusi analysed and imported. It also means that we have to analyse and build the functionality so that we can give back to the PALDO project. More information can be found here.

With a 70.000 word Swahili dictionary, we have sufficient data for the first two OLPC dictionaries that will amount to something. They will be Swahili and English.. the English content comes with Kamusi as well :)

So you can help; you can develop, you can edit and you can sponsor this project.

Thanks,
GerardM

Donations, putting your money where your mouth is

When you want to get things done, you can do it yourself or you can get someone else to do it for you. Within many Open Source or Open Content projects you can donate your programming, your content and your money. When you are a programmer or an editor, you can choose what to develop, what to edit, because you are a volunteer. Nobody can tell you what to do. When you volunteer to give money, there is no such luck. You can give, you may be thanked, and that is it.

Unless of course you are a big time donor. When you give a sufficient amount of money and the purpose for this money fits within the aims of the organisation you give it to, you can determine what the money is spend on. This is not an option for small time donors.

Many small projects have been identified that need doing, projects that do not get done because they do not have priority or because nobody volunteers to do them. For such projects a specification can be made and a cost estimate can be given. These can be published and donations for these projects can be solicited. When enough people have contributed funding for a project, it can be executed.

For the complete policy read; Donations, putting your money where your mouth is.

Thanks,
GerardM

What language is this text ?

When you write a text, you know your audience and you select a language accordingly. Given that English is the lingua franca of this day and age, and given that my public is international I do write in English. However, there is nothing that stops me or any of the other people who contribute to this blog from writing in a different language.

This is a bad thing. It would be so much better when I was able to actively indicate the language that I am writing. Obviously, Blogger can have its own routines to distinguish certain languages, but I am absolutely certain that they will not recognise the majority of languages.

While I am typing this blog, I have indicated to my spell checker that I am using UK English spelling. This means that many of the mistakes I make will not be seen by you. Having indicated that the languages IS UK English, it would have been great when it was picked up by the Blogger software.

Consider, when I inform Blogger that I am writing UK English, my Firefox spelling extension does not need to guess anymore. It would provide me with a much better functionality and it would make functionality possible in languages that are not well supported..

So please blogger.com, please allow me to tag the language of my texts.

Thanks,
GerardM

A new menu

In preparation for the presentations at Wikimania, we are making OmegaWiki extra nice. I am finishing the new main page where you will find information about the things we have been preparing that are not there yet.

There have been things in our wiki that do not have any functionality yet. A lot of work has been done in the last weeks in refactoring our code. We are making changes to the code in order to make it easier for new developers to get to grips with the code. These changes will make it possible to build some of the more complex functionality that we need.

While we are working hard at OmegaWiki, Knewco is working hard preparing their Desktop, with its Knowlet and Semantic Support. It is really cool that OmegaWiki will not only be useful in its own right, but that applications are going to be build on top of it.

I am really excited about going to Taipei. I will be happy to talk and demonstrate what we are on about.. It is less than a week I am thrilled to see all the everything coming together :)

Thanks,
GerardM

Ch'orti', a language spoken in Guatemala and Honduras

Ch'orti' as a language has caa as its ISO 639-3 code, some 30.000 people speak the language and according to Reeck many more belong to the associated ethnic population.

I have been adding languages to the ISO 639-3 collection for some time now, I started with Ghotuo (aaa) and I have now progressed to Ch'orti' (caa). Many have few speakers, many are extinct, several are sign languages and almost all of them I have already forgotten.

So why do this, is there method to this madness.. OmegaWiki aims to include all words of all languages, but what languages are there ? Do we want to discuss the notion of yet another linguistic entity that we should support. Does something like Brithenig (bzt) deserve its place under the sun ?

I do not mind the discussion, but I do mind what the result will be of such a discussion. It needs to come to a conclusion and I do not want to be in the position that people look to me for a verdict. It is not a good idea either to have the OmegaWiki commission be in that position. It is for all these reasons that we decided on adopting standards and started with the creation of portals for the ISO 639-3 languages. We are now at the next phase, creating the DefinedMeanings for these languages and make them part of the ISO 639-3 collection.

This is only what is recognised by one standard, there are other standards that help indicate what the precise linguistic entity is that is to be documented in OmegaWiki. First we should finish this, there are currently 1365 entries in the ISO 639-3 collection .. there are many more thousands to go :)

Thanks,
GerardM

Aklanon ...

Aklanon is a language spoken in the Philipines. The ISO-639-3 code is "akl" and according to a 1990 census some 394.545 people speak this language.

On OmegaWiki, Aklanon has its own portal and I was really thilled when Chief Mike indicated his interest in working on the Aklanon content. We do want Aklanon but we also have our own standards. One of these standards is that the Babel templates for a language are in that language. I really appreciate the notion that the Babel templates have to be understood however, the Babel templates are one of the first things that we hope to get in any language.

When we have the Aklanon Babel templates in Aklanon, it will be a privilege to have Aklanon as the next language that we support in OmegaWiki.

Thanks,
GerardM

Assorted statistics

OmegaWiki has reached 30.000 DefinedMeanings, we have some 258.000 Expressions. And as some people do not stop telling me there are about 28.000 Expressions in the largest language and this means that there is a close relation between the number of Expressions in a language and the number of concepts. This is said to indicate that OmegaWiki should be able to scale. :)

The Webaliser statistics have given me a surprise; there is now more info to be found. What is nice to see is that there is now a breakdown in where the traffic comes from. As we have a lot of traffic from crawlers, it would be good to exclude crawlders in order to see where interested PEOPLE come from. Erik told me that the new features are probably due to the upgrade of this week.

Malafaya is now the fourth person who has taken an interest in our statistics. He has worked on the reliability of the statistics of collections. His first effort improved the numbers, his second stab at it improved the performance of the queries a lot.

Finally the Alexa statistics have improved a lot for no apparent reason. We have had times when we were not ranked at all or we could be found above the 800.000 range.. Now we are for a few days hovering around the 368.500 mark. Still not impressive but it looks much better. When you compare the Alexa numbers with our Webaliser numbers, the only thing that can be said is that for Alexa the numbers are statistically not really valid.. This will improve as our community grows.

Thanks,
GerardM

Server upgraded; dataset support online

The OmegaWiki.org server has been upgraded to Debian etch. This gives us PHP 5.2.0, which is needed to run the latest version of OmegaWiki. (In the process, we exchanged our hand-compiled PHP and Apache binaries with distribution packages.) OmegaWiki itself has also been upgraded. The current version of the code has support for so-called "data-sets".

A data-set is essentially an instance of OmegaWiki which can contain a completely separate set of DefinedMeanings and associated data. This is useful for importing authoritative sources which may either not yet be fully editable, or which are meant to be retained alongside an editable version. It also allows us to showcase imported databases, to convince organizations that own the data to release it freely and make it fully editable.

The current version already supports mapping DefinedMeanings across data-sets. So you can indicate that concept A in data-set 1 is the same as concept B in data-set 2. However, it does not yet support copying data from one data-set to another, which is what we are working on right now (some hints to it are already in the code).

Currently OmegaWiki has a single data-set only. We are considering to set up some example data-sets to let the user community play with this new functionality.

A word of the day

Like so many other resources that are lexical in nature, OmegaWiki has a word of the day. Our word of the day is not prepared in advance and we leave it to the community to create one. I am always relieved when there is actually a word of the day when I wake up.

Today's word of the day is interesting for many reasons. The word is wheat. There are several issues to consider.

• It is marked as "English (United States)". There is however no "English (United Kingdom)" and as I cannot find this alternate, it should be just "English".
• The definition has not been translated into English. This is very much optional, but it makes it so much easier to translate the definition in yet another language
• In the definition, wheat is said to be part of the family ''Graminacee" of the genus "Triticum". According to Wikipedia the family should be "Poaceae".
  

The big thing here is that taxonomy while a science, is not exact. There is no such thing as a name that will be true for forever. With some regularity it is found that names need to be changed. These revisions may mean that species that are known to the public are no longer to be that species, they can be split up or lumped together.

The issue here is that without being able to reference to both families that are grassy, it is hard to appreciate this definition. This word of the day clearly shows why there is a need for a dictionary of life, a dictionary that explains all these names and shows the relations between the different validly published taxonomical names.

Thanks,
GerardM

OmegaWiki only a translation dictionary ?

There is some misinformation about OmegaWiki, it is said for instance that OmegaWiki is only a translation dictionary. There are also people who do not consider OmegaWiki as relevant because it is not a Wikimedia Foundation project.

It is for the people that have not looked at OmegaWiki for a long time or have not really looked well that we want to state the obvious; OmegaWiki is not only but also a translation dictionary. When you look at the number of expressions per language, you will find that we have almost 30.000 DefinedMeanings, the reason why we have 11.000 more English Expressions then what we have for any other language is because we have collections that are at still mostly English. Collections like the ISO-DIS-639-6 are relevant because of the information that is included in the data.

OmegaWiki is becoming relevant because our data is starting to be used outside our project as well. Positano News uses OmegaWiki data for "assisted reading", this helps people to understand terminology that is in an Italian news article. It does give you definitions and translations.

It may be that the current possibilities at OmegaWiki are not immediately obvious; there are many DefinedMeanings that do not have any annotation. An annotation can identify the part of speech for a word, it can provide you with a sample sentence or how to hyphenate a word. We want to include links to other websites; we want to link to Wikipedia articles in order to make it convenient to our users to find good encyclopaedic information.

OmegaWiki is not feature complete. We want to add many more features, but our first priority is to make sure that it works well and that the features that matter most are included. We need to improve on our performance and, we need to make sure that we provide a framework that facilitates collaboration with other organisations.

The Wikimedia Foundation is one organisation that we really want to collaborate with. On a personal level we have been involved and we want to extend this by collaborating on an organisational level as well. This often repeated intention may be one reason why certain people are so apprehensive about OmegaWiki; we wanted it to be a WMF project, it is not a WMF project but we still see room for doing good together.

Thanks,
GerardM

If you love somebody set them free

On OmegaWiki we have many sysops. Giving people the abilities that comes with the sysop flag is what has prevented a lot of vandalism and spam. We are happy and grateful that this has worked out so well for us. As a consequence, we do not have the eternal admins versus the editors controversy, our admins do not have to do anything; they are kindly requested to do good and amazingly they do.

With some sadness, we learned that a Wiktionary admin is leaving Wiktionary; he was told to be more active or else. There is a silver lining in that this guy announced to become more active on OmegaWiki. Obviously every project makes his bed and lies in it. We have chosen to have as little bureaucracy as possible. The question is very much; how is it going to scale.

OmegaWiki will expand by including "Wikis for Professionals". Each will include the terminology for a specific domain extended with specific information and functionality. With more people signing up to such a community, it may acquire its own rules. These rules should fit in the larger community that is OmegaWiki. What I expect is that often the unwritten rules will be the more important ones. In a Wiki for Professionals, people will be interested when the project is relevant. When this proves to be demonstrably so, it may become important to be identifiable to gain the benefits of the association with the project. The flip side of the coin is that negative behaviour can damage a professional reputation.

In a year, the community of OmegaWiki will be different. We work hard to provide it with an environment that will enable it to do good. At this stage it is still very much basic functionality that we are building. There is much new functionality and data waiting to go live. When it has, we will love to hear what is good and what could be better. We will love it when people help us morph our functionality and make our environment more relevant.

The only thing that we will insist on is that things can coexist and people collaborate, in that way we set not only the data free but also the imagination free, we will love it and we will set them free.

Thanks,
GerardM

250.000 expressions

Today we reached the milestone of 250.000 Expressions at OmegaWiki. It is special because most of this data has been entered by hand. We find that when people get enthused by the concept of OmegaWiki, they do make a difference for the language that they champion.

We have people who have a particular interest in Georgian, Khmer and Spanish, it shows in the statistics as these languages grow much faster than the others.

Aveyron is the 250.000th entry in OmegaWiki and, it is only fitting that Ascánder was the person adding it. Ascander is one of the most valuable contributors to OmegaWiki. Aveyron is part of a project to include information from the ISO-3166-2. In this standard it is detailed in what way countries are subdivided. It does not state that Italy has provinces, the USA has states or that Germany has Bundeslander. It does give the names of these entities.

So, OmegaWiki is evolving nicely. We hope that in line with how Wikis evolve, we will have an easier time to get 250.000 more Expressions.

Thanks,
GerardM

After a week of hacking, testing !!

A lot of work has been done on the OmegaWiki functionality. We have been working on functionality that is of importance to the organisations that we hope to collaborate with.

There were several issues that we have dealt with:

• Support multiple "data-sets" within a single OmegaWiki installation. These sets can be used to store imported "authoritative databases," such as scientific databases.
  
• Users can navigate within a data-set or choose a different one to look at. The default set can be configured globally, for a user group, or for an individual user.
• Different data-sets can have different permission levels.
• DefinedMeanings in different data-sets that are identical (describing the same concept) can be mapped to each other.
• When data is imported, we can choose which data-set to import it into.
  

There are several parts of the puzzle that are still missing; we are however at a stage where we need to test our data. So we are going to make this functionality go live soon. The first thing is to know that after all the database changes and much refactored functionality everything still works.

The next thing will be to experiment with a first authoritative or additional database. The obvious first resources are the GEMET collection and the ISO-639-6 collection. This is all in preparation of more partners that will be collaborating in the OmegaWiki environment.

More functionality will be implemented in the coming weeks:

• The possibility to add multiple values without having having to reload the editor each time
• Allowing for annotations that are dependent on previously set values; this will for the first time provide us with terminological functionality
• More functionality is in the pipe line, I think you will love it when we have it :)

Thanks,
GerardM

PS It was a fun week, we had a day with a negative number of lines added. We had to change functionality to enable the software to run under Windows. To relax, I have read several chapters of Accelerando. It was fun to watch Kim and Erik work together, my appreciation for both grew. It was gratifying to see my dream become more of a reality :)

Annotations, hyphenations and IPA

On OmegaWiki we aannotate. In addition to the sample sentences, it is now possible to add hyphenations. A thank you to Sean Burke and Kim Bruning who made this possible.. :)

It is also possible to include the International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA. On the one hand we should feel confident that people will do good. On the other hand, a lot of the IPA notations out there are not useful because they assume that the persons using it have a specific background.

In OmegaWiki we have a public that is truly multi-lingual. This is best experienced when you change the user preferences to another language. Most of the language labels may be shown in the selected language. The consequence of a multi-lingual public is that only IPA notations without language specific shortcuts are useful.

I am sure that you have an opinion about this, we hope to learn your arguments ..

Thanks,
GerardM