Hi Gerard,
I am extremely happy that I can inform you on Boxing day that a tired Erik has produced the first tangible result of the Wikidata / Ultimate Wiktionary project. It shows that we want great content in many languages, that we want to include thesaurus information and that we are happy to include with gratitude content like the Gemet thesaurus.
First of all: Congratulations for the working prototype. I think that UW is a very important project and it is good to see that it is making progress.
Our goal with Ultimate Wiktionary is to provide an even more complex application that will make this data collaboratively editable, to add dynamic user-based views, APIs, and crucial features such as inflections, etymologies, complex relations and attributes, and much more. This will be a huge challenge. Fortunately, more funding seems to be on the horizon, allowing us to put more developers on the job.
I have made some experiments and this led to some thoughts and questions. I hope that you do not mind.
I have tried http://www.epov.org/wd-gemet/index.php/flower and have seen two Entries: en and en-US. Both seem to have independent lists of translations, as en lists en-US as translation but en-US does not list en as translation. How will this be handled? What is your way to make sure that the definitions and translations remain consistent? In the case of flower there should be no distinction between en and en-US whatsoever. I have asked this before, but so far I have not received a response that really solved the matter.
I have also had a look at the entries for "color" and "colour". The interesting thing here is that one (en) has a definition and one (en-US) doesn't.
And when I navigate to the different translations, (e.g. German: Farbe), I get the same list of definitions in several languages. However, when we translate Farbe back into English, we would have to make the distinction between two different meanings: color (hue) and paint (for the wall). As all the different translations seem to be forming one ring, I wonder, how the meaning would be split in the German entry, and how one would select the translations into pl, sl, gb onto these two meanings.
Kind regards,
Heiko Evermann