Thursday, July 29, 2010

#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.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

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

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

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