On Tue, 28 Oct 2014 17:03:37 +0530
chandrakantd(a)cdac.in wrote:
Hi All,
Its been long time that we initiated the discussion about coming up
with the Open Dictionary project under the feathers of FUEL. Since,
this idea is aligned towards the goals of FUEL, I feel it can be
taken up by the community. Currently we do not find such
dictionaries in open source domain- one that can be created,
consumed, modified and owned by the people.
What is your opinion on this ?
First I would say it would not be prudent to begin on a dictionary
from scratch.. we need to find a way to leverage the existing
dictionaries in print form
an example is here
http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/list.html#hindi
where the have probably bought limited rights to digitize and
publish it online. But this does not become an open dictionary.
then there is example of dictionary prepared at IIIT hyd, which now
forms en-hi data in freedict, story goes some existing dictionary was
torn up and pages divided between a team who entered the words,
meanings , example sentences etc. not using all the words but keeping
most commonly used ones to total around 20000 entries.
With open dictionary - we get the initial dictionary (from some
publisher), digitize it, store it in an extensible form, for easy
consumption in different modes - either web, through api, dict
protocol, or as a desktop/mobile app. once digitized whole dictionary
database would be available for anyone to use as per agreed licenses
(gpl/ creative commons etc).
To use an existing published dictionary would demand either buying
the rights outright (pay good some, so find sponsor for that) or
convince publisher benefits of putting it in a open form, which they
can also use to print dictionary in different forms, release in
digital forms (CD, website).
If this is tall order then plan to do it from scratch (while also
re-using existing open resources), with a target and time-line in
sight, say achieving 10,000-20,000 most frequently used words in
first year, and then keep adding on.
So as starting point think on the following lines:
1) What all information should the dictionary contain?
eg. word meanings , or en-lang word pairs with some grammar
info. or more like entry in book dictionary and with example
sentences/phrases, audio for words, pictorial etc.
2) In what form it will be maintained - say some set of predefined
fields which will have to be populated for every entry added, or say
in the wiki forms (like wiktionary or omegawiki).
3) What we can leverage from existing open dict projects
(freedict/wiktionary/omegawiki/xobdo), to create a more extended form
which looks like proper dictionary than just a word list pairs.
Karunakar