[Wikipedia-l] Word Wide Lexicon

[Kurt Jansson]

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 at yahoo.com>
An: Kurt Jansson <kurt at 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 at yahoo.com>
An: Kurt Jansson <kurt at 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