Monday, October 28, 2013

Open Source Dictionaries for Smartphones, Mobile Phones and Computers

DictionaryForMIDs and OmegaWiki are now partnering to provide software and dictionaries for smartphones, mobile phones, tablets and PCs.  Download the software for your device and add one or more dictionaries to them. In the first release you find monolingual, bilingual and multilingual dictionaries. If your language or combination of language/s is missing, don't hesitate to contact us (s.cretella [at] localcontent.eu).

Besides OmegaWiki dictionaries there are also plenty of other dictionaries from other sources online. Over time we hope to also find a good co-operation with them.

Over the time more language combinations and additional educational projects will be added.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

And ... we are back online

So here we go again. OmegaWiki is back and working. Have fun editing :-)

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Server is down ...

... just a very short note: the OmegaWiki server is down. Probably a harware failure. We are working to get it back online as soon as possible.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Starting with a weekly "English word of the day"

OmegaWiki has many specific topics, though most people are interested in general terminology. Many people learn English or are just generally interested to know how things are done. The first series of "Words of the Day" were chosen from the general terminology. We wish to achieve similar efforts also for other languages. If you wish to have your language have a similar service, don't hesitate to contact us.

The English Word of the Day can be followed on various social networks:
Facebook
Twitter
Google+

Friday, October 11, 2013

Work once use multiple times

For many of us who deal with languages where there is often not even a handful of people working this is kind of a "must reach" situation. Those languages need all the support they can get and often hours and hours of research is necessary to find out how things should go. OmegaWiki, like many other database applications can be the basis for such a situation. But many others do not make their contents freely available.
Besides dictionaries (for computer and smartphone and eventually even printed) we do need spell checkers and in almost all cases an automated translation that then only needs proof reading would be "the thing".
Years ago I already wanted to reach the possibility to automatically "feed" contents to Apertium and we are half way done to go the way OmegaWiki-Apertium. The image shows that we can annotate our words to show that a noun is male or femal in German (just to take an obvious example for me living in Germany). What is missing is the exact definition of the paradigm to be used. This should be possible via the same feature we have for annotation.
Then there comes the second cave eat: OmegaWiki people would like to build automatic inflection, based on rules. Apertium already does exactly this. This means we need the same "grammar rules" to be defined and used.
IMHO it is relevant not to invent the wheel again, but to create interfaces to already existing projects so that one can help the other.
Like I already said: it does not make sense to me to work on many different projects to protect my language, because like for all people: there is only so much time.

Tuesday, October 08, 2013

Back to OmegaWiki

It's quite some time now I did not edit on OmegaWiki, and during that time we, mainly Outi and me, organised translations for a basic dictionary for children. Many people around the world contributed to these translations. I hope, we still have all names, since they will be on the "Children's Dictionary" project page of OmegaWiki. Right now I am adapting IDs the entries of my table are associated with the OmegaWiki ID and once we have that the collected data can be uploaded. This means right now I do have quite some work and it probably will take some months, BUT once done: things will become much easier.
Of course there are also other data sources I have in tables here, but all need to be checked and compared to what is already online. One step at a time :-)
So if you feel like contributing: please do so online or get in touch with me and I can provide you with the data export to be edited for the Children's dictionary.