Thursday, October 04, 2007

Changes in the user interface

A DefinedMeaning in OmegaWiki can have a lot of data associated with it. China borders on so many countries and seas that it is just a bit much. So it makes sense to bundle certain types of information together and keep them separately. This has a profound impact on what the data looks like. So far I was happy when we had the data on the screen but now it becomes possible to think where does it makes sense to have the data. I asked Erik if the incoming messages could be at the bottom of the page..

Well some things seem like miracles and we can have them in five minutes.. The problem with the collations is that at this moment it has to be by hand. This makes that it does not scale. With the "borders on" example however, we have a great showcase WHY we need to be able to sort these texts and also why they should be Expressions in OmegaWiki like all the other information that we hold.

Really, I could not be more happy with the progress that started to happen.. :)

Thanks,
GerardM

4 comments:

MovGP0 said...

Some issues should not get solved in OmegaWiki. This inlcudes the inclusion of semantic facts like which countries are bordering others, because this is handeled better by the Semantic Wikipedia (SMW) Extension.

Instead, Omegawiki might be better in making important annotations like Wordtype and IPA-Spelling more visible and accessible.

GerardM said...

Why do you think that it is handled better in the Semantic MediaWiki ?

Semantic MediaWiki is able to show things in a monolingual system, it has no way of showing the same information in multiple languages like OmegaWiki can.

So really I disagree.

Thanks,
GerardM

MovGP0 said...

I think that that is not a problem of Semantic Mediawiki, but a problem of mediawiki.

User accounts are separated from the projects, translations are not bidirectional as they are in omegawiki. Only the commons where hacked so that shared pictures got possible - that was not the case anytime.

I think that semantic annotations should be the domain of the SMW extension, where translations should be done in an omegawiki-extension. I think that Omegawiki should not be a separate project, but host as a translation engine for wikipedia; rather than the current unidirectional translation links that are currently used.

GerardM said...

FYI, OmegaWiki is not a Wikimedia Foundation project. It was offered and refused. This does not mean that we cannot cooperate.

One principal problem with your thinking is that contrary to all WMF projects with the exception of Meta and Commons, the projects are monolingual. Also OmegaWiki is NOT a translation engine it is a repository of concepts and what they are called in multiple languages. In order to be a translation engine you have to translate whole sentences.

Thanks,
GerardM