Dear Wikipedians! Today I read an article in a mailinglist which lead me to a slashdot discussion about a project called "World Wide Lexicon". There seem to be some wrong expectations about it so I mailed the author of WWL to ask him and to point him to Wikipedia. I think it's a very interresting project, but you can take a look at it yourself: the project: www.worldwidelexicon.org the /. discussion: http://slashdot.org/articles/02/04/05/1911255.shtml?tid=95 the answers to my emails: -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: Brian McConnell <brianmsf(a)yahoo.com> An: Kurt Jansson <kurt(a)jansson.de> Gesendet: Sonntag, 7. April 2002 19:55 Betreff: RE: Why "Lexicon"? Kurt, Thank you for your email. I called it the worldwide lexicon because the system can be used to retrieve definitions for words as well as translations. For example, if you are doing a monolingual search, you can submit several different types of queries to a WWL server, including: - syn : returns synonymous words and phrases - ant : returns antonymous words and phrases - def : returns verbose description for a word or phrase - pcat : returns parent categories that the word, phrase or resource locator belongs to - ccat : returns child categories that are associated with the entry - vis : returns words that represent visually similar objects I like Wikipedia, and would like to talk to someone about joining it to the WWL system. I think it could be very useful in processing monolingual queries. All they will need to do is write a PHP script that recognizes several SOAP simple methods. I would also like to talk to the wikipedia software developer about the possibility of modifying the system to be used as a translation dictionary. I don't like to reinvent the wheel, and it seems that the system they have built can be modified to host a user supported database of language pair translations. The benefit of joining Wikipedia is the system will appear as a data source along with other web dictionaries, lexicons and semantic network servers. The most useful feature of our system is that it will enable client applications, a browser plug in for example, to locate WWL data sources on the fly, and then submit standardized queries to them. Thus, one fairly simple piece of code can talk to lots of dictionaries throughout the web (you might use it one day to lookup translations for words in a Spanish document, and another to look for verbose definitions for words in your home language). The main goal of WWL is to create a GNUtella like system for locating and communicating with dictionary and semantic network servers on the web (there are many). The problem today is that each system has its own proprietary front end, so all of this information is fragmented. By creating a simple protocol for locating and talking to systems, it is possible to create what appears to be a single worldwide dictionary/semantic network that can be accessed with a few lines of code. Thanks for writing. Best regards, Brian Mcconnell -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: Brian McConnell <brianmsf(a)yahoo.com> An: Kurt Jansson <kurt(a)jansson.de> Gesendet: Sonntag, 7. April 2002 23:53 Betreff: RE: Why "Lexicon"? Kurt, Thanks for the quick reply. Another point... WWL does not do full text translation. It is designed to assist word and phrase translation, as well as monolingual dictionary or encyclopedia searches. As you know, translating full text without human intervention is a very difficult problem. While I could see translation systems using WWL to query dictionaries (to expand the scope of their vocabularies), the WWL specification does not say anything about full text translation. Our primary goal is to create a distributed dictionary/encyclopedia protocol that is very easy to implement in client and server software, and that does not require dictionary servers to make changes to their systems besides writing a few scripts to generate SOAP responses instead of HTML. WWL's purpose is to make it easy to automatically locate and communicate with WWL-aware dictionary and semantic net servers. I like to describe this as GNUtella for dictionaries. You are welcome to forward this my email to the wikipedia list or developers. As I mentioned, I think you could do some interesting things by making your systems accessible via the WWL SOAP interface. Thanks again for your email. Best regards. Brian McConnell