OmegaWiki

From Open Progress

OmegaWiki is a collaborative project. It aims to bring lexicological, terminological, ontological and specialist data to all words of all languages.

1 Some history
2 Organisation of the project
- 2.1 Members of the OmegaWiki commission
3 Information
4 External information

[edit] Some history

What was called at first Ultimate Wiktionary was very much the result of the frustration in the Wiktionary projects of the Wikimedia Foundation. This frustration was felt because there were several small projects that did want to collaborate and others that did not. The frustration that an error had to be corrected in often more than 10 Wiktionary projects. The time spent working on Wiktionary, proved to be beneficial because it showed what information it was that needed to go into a project based on relational database technology.

[edit] The design criteria

The information that can be found in the Wiktionaries needs to be included
An error needs to be corrected only once and, data entered needs to be available for everyone
The same data needs to be made available in the language selected in the user preferences of the user.

The original functional data design was very much a relational implementation of the data. A very important moment was at the LSGB conference in Berlin; we had the opportunity to have the professors Alan K. Melby and Sue Ellen Wright look at the database design. They scrutinised it and we were all very pleased how well it was received. The one big thing that we will have to work on is giving terminology its required place.

[edit] Kennisnet

It was understood that this was a big project. A project where it made sense to have someone work on the code. One developer had the audacity to quote a price. At a meeting at Kennisnet, it was mentioned that with this seed money we could start the project. We did and were able to get it sufficiently going to show that it is possible to include relational data in a MediaWiki environment by December 2005.

[edit] University Bamberg

We were also quite fortunate to connect to the University Bamberg, they have a project teaching advanced students of the Italian language. They have a requirement for a terminological tool. WiktionaryZ as it was called at that stage could fit the bill. The initial seed money did not suffice and we were really happy with the help that was provided to create the quality extensions needed to have our software be considered for inclusion in the MediaWiki software.

[edit] EIONET and GEMET

We were really fortunate with our contacts to EIONET; they gave us permission to include their GEMET environmental thesaurus in our project. It allowed us to demonstrate from the start that we were technically able to show a thesaurus with relations in a Wiki environment. It was also a boon as our first editing functionality only allowed us to change existing content.

[edit] Knewco

Jimmy Wales met in Brasilia Barend Mons and they discussed open source, open content, why certain projects worked and why others do not. Barend on advice from Jimmy contacted us and slowly but surely a real great collaboration developed. Knewco is a company that is based in the scientific world; it has its background in the data mining particularly of the literature of the bio-medical domain.

When you perform data mining, one of the limiting factors is the extend of the underlying thesaurus that is used. When an expression is in a different domain, it means that you either extend the thesaurus or that you can not make the necessary relations. For Knewco a project that aims to include all words of all languages was an opportunity that they did not pass by.

Knewco invested some serious effort in our project; it can be safely said that their contributions are pivotal to what OmegaWiki became. They provided us with developers and contents. Much of the contents we will be allowed to host we would not have had otherwise.

[edit] Wikimedia Foundation

It would have been the natural thing to have OmegaWiki hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. However, in the time when our developments and requirements grew, the WMF was pretty much occupied reorganising its own organisation while growing exponentially. We also had several requirements that were deemed to be problematic; we insist on thanking our partners. We project a growth that is quite steep and the WMF cannot guarantee that it is able to be able to meet these requirements.

[edit] Organisation of the project

OmegaWiki has a committee that is responsible for the running of the project. This means that as long as what is decided is lawful under Dutch law and, is in line with the aims of Open Progress it can be executed. Obviously there are restrictions regarding funding.