Dear Federico, you have here the contact for the project openZIM.
The main contact is Manuel Schneider (manuel.schneider@wikimedia.ch) and the group of developers can be contacted with the address (dev-l@openzim.org).
Manuel can clarify you the status of the project.
Federico Leva is member and treasurer of the board of Wikimedia Italia. Wikimedia Italia is looking for a new solution for the CD of offline edition of it.wikipedia and would have a look in OpenZIM to investigate if this solution can match the requirements of Italian board.
Wikimedia Italia seems to be interested also to support the project like Wikimedia CH is doing.
I have received from Manuel also the notification that some tests are not in progress due to the overload of work, but I think that Federico could help you to found some testers.
Ilario Valdelli Wikimedia CH
Ciao Frederico,
we are happy to hear that Wikimedia Italia plans to join our effort to establish a standard offline format for Wikimedia (and other free) content.
The idea of openZIM is * to provide documentation of a standardized, efficient file format (the "ZIM file format") for the offline content including ** article hypertext data ** MIME types such as images ** full text search index) * to provide a free and open source implementation of the ZIM file format, consisting of ** libzim (general functions to read and write ZIM files) ** zimwriter (CLI tool to write the raw content from a database to a ZIM file) ** zimindexer (CLI tool to create a full text index) ** zimreader (small webserver application providing access to the ZIM files' contents fur users / readers)
There is also Kiwix, another offline reader (GUI application) for Wikipedia which stores its data in ZIM files and uses libzim. MoulinWiki and Wikiwix are basing on Kiwix.
openZIM has a booth at the LinuxTag on June 14th to 17th.
We are currently working on a Wikipedia DVD with the german Wikipedia we want to give away for free. It will contain a beta release of zimreader, kiwix and a current Wikipedia dump.
After LinuxTag we should focus on bugfixing and try to start working on the porting projects. We have a server sponsored by Wikimedia CH (openzim.org) with a wiki, mailinglist and development environment (shell access, databases, subversion repository, virtual Windows instance, Symbian SDK) running there.
I would recommend if you would invite all potential developers you have to join our mailing list on dev-l@openzim.org and our IRC channel #openzim on Freenode and check out the code from our SVN and start messing around with it. Questions can always been asked on the ML or IRC.
Greets,
Manuel
Am Dienstag, 19. Mai 2009 schrieb Ilario Valdelli:
Dear Federico, you have here the contact for the project openZIM.
The main contact is Manuel Schneider (manuel.schneider@wikimedia.ch) and the group of developers can be contacted with the address (dev-l@openzim.org).
Manuel can clarify you the status of the project.
Federico Leva is member and treasurer of the board of Wikimedia Italia. Wikimedia Italia is looking for a new solution for the CD of offline edition of it.wikipedia and would have a look in OpenZIM to investigate if this solution can match the requirements of Italian board.
Wikimedia Italia seems to be interested also to support the project like Wikimedia CH is doing.
I have received from Manuel also the notification that some tests are not in progress due to the overload of work, but I think that Federico could help you to found some testers.
Ilario Valdelli Wikimedia CH
Ciao, Manuel.
Manuel Schneider, 21/05/2009 22:17:
The idea of openZIM is [...]
Thank you. So, you won't develop Kiwix, but a separate reader. My only question is: what do you need (money and/or people) to be able to make it saleable (for Linux, Mac and Windows) within, say, October or November? We may offer some contract. When the implementation is ready, we will offer an [almost] ready-to-use DVD to a publisher to sell it: they should be able to clean up the database by themselves, but they're not able to produce a good engine. BTW, if you want I can send you the beta of the DVD the italian publisher prepared: the GUI is similar to Kiwix's one, it was designed to be FLOSS, based on XHTML, and runs only on Windows (quite the opposite of yours). Cheers, Federico
Ciao Frederico,
Am Donnerstag, 21. Mai 2009 schrieb Federico Leva:
Thank you. So, you won't develop Kiwix, but a separate reader. My only question is: what do you need (money and/or people) to be able to make it saleable (for Linux, Mac and Windows) within, say, October or November?
to clarify: Our aim is to provide tools to create such DVDs. Our zimreader is only a sample application.
libzim can be used by everyone who wants to make his or her own Wikipedia reader and use ZIM as a storage format. This results in all Wikipedia readers and dumps will be compatible, meaning that every user can choose his or her favourite reader application and get new Wikipedia dumps from whomever provides a fresh ZIM file.
Emmanuel Engelhart, the developer of Kiwix is also part of the openZIM developer team.
For making the italian DVD you have several options: * you hire someone to make ZIM files using zimwriter and a reader application using libzim you ship on your DVD
* you take zimwriter to make your ZIM file and ship the zimreader or Kiwix on your DVD
* you ask someone of our team - most likely Emmanuel - if he is willing to create a DVD for you, using Kiwix or zimreader
openZIM does not make or publish DVDs, except of this sample DVD for LinuxTag which is a demonstration object for us.
We may offer some contract. When the implementation is ready, we will offer an [almost] ready-to-use DVD to a publisher to sell it: they should be able to clean up the database by themselves, but they're not able to produce a good engine.
I didn't really get that part. We provide you with the software - it is up to you which articles you put into a ZIM file. The reader software is also available. As an alternative we provide a simple library for software developers so they can implement ZIM without having to get their hands on it.
BTW, if you want I can send you the beta of the DVD the italian publisher prepared: the GUI is similar to Kiwix's one, it was designed to be FLOSS, based on XHTML, and runs only on Windows (quite the opposite of yours).
I would be pretty interested, especially in the source code. So if it is online just sent a link to this mailinglist.
Greets,
Manuel
Ciao, Manuel.
Manuel Schneider, 21/05/2009 23:05:
I didn't really get that part. We provide you with the software - it is up to you which articles you put into a ZIM file.
This is what I meant. I would know how I can help you (and Emmanuel) to develop the software (openZIM + GUI reader application like Kiwix), and how long it will take.
BTW, if you want I can send you the beta of the DVD the italian publisher prepared: the GUI is similar to Kiwix's one, it was designed to be FLOSS, based on XHTML, and runs only on Windows (quite the opposite of yours).
I would be pretty interested, especially in the source code. So if it is online just sent a link to this mailinglist.
It is a 7,5 GB DVD. Since the collaboration with the publisher who developed it has failed, the source code has not been published yet (it was a contractual obligation, but we didn't sign the contract), but perhaps if you find its features interesting we can try to get the source (while it's difficult).
Do you know http://sourceforge.net/projects/wanda-tools/ (another italian project to produce a DVD)?
Thanks, Federico
Ciao Frederic,
Am Freitag, 22. Mai 2009 schrieb Federico Leva:
I would know how I can help you (and Emmanuel) to develop the software (openZIM + GUI reader application like Kiwix), and how long it will take.
okay, I see.
I guess we wait for an answer directly from Emmanuel. I won't be a big help here, I am coordinating this project, but I'm not into the developing process itself.
I would be pretty interested, especially in the source code. So if it is online just sent a link to this mailinglist.
It is a 7,5 GB DVD. Since the collaboration with the publisher who developed it has failed, the source code has not been published yet (it was a contractual obligation, but we didn't sign the contract), but perhaps if you find its features interesting we can try to get the source (while it's difficult).
You might want to send it to me by mail, I will send you my postal address by private mail (the ML in CC has public archives).
Do you know http://sourceforge.net/projects/wanda-tools/ (another italian project to produce a DVD)?
I think I have heard from it, but I will look into it. What is your opinion about it? Why you don't use it? (please don't get me wrong, I am really looking forward to have a free and standardized format to be able to exchange data files and readers freely, so I am happy that you want to go with ZIM).
Greets,
Manuel
Manuel Schneider, 22/05/2009 00:39:
You might want to send it to me by mail, I will send you my postal address by private mail (the ML in CC has public archives).
Yes, please.
Do you know http://sourceforge.net/projects/wanda-tools/ (another italian project to produce a DVD)?
I think I have heard from it, but I will look into it. What is your opinion about it? Why you don't use it?
Well, the DVD they produced was quite good while compared to other DVD whic were available in 2007. For example, they resolved the problem of categories simply by creating huge pages containing up to 25.000 elements. But: the wikitext to html conversion, if I remember correctly, is not great, so you can find an infobox on the left instead of right; the search engine frequently fails; many pages are lost because each (html) page is stored in a directory by alphabetic order and titles are converted to lowercase, so if you have two articles, "ADA" and "Ada", the latter vanishes, and also other pages are lost, we don't know why (e.g. ADZ). Then the DVD development was taken on by EXA (the publisher), and wanda was discontinued. However, this is the last release: http://linux.studenti.polito.it/linuxstudenti/wikidvd_0.23-09Oct2007.iso.bz2 http://linux.studenti.polito.it/linuxstudenti/wikidvd_0.23-09Oct2007.iso.bz2...
The EXA DVD has other categories, search, layout and database problems (and many others), and they're not able to resolve them (nor to develop software for Linux): I suppose html format is not the right way.