[kde-edu]: [Parley-devel] common vocabulary lists

[Sabine Cretella]

Hi :-)

Google applications: well these are a workaround for me, since we are
working on a collaborative system to collect and share lexical data. We have
already been testing it with the Agrovoc (FAO) data. It just doesn't make
sense to start coding on some intermediate application until Ambaradan works
well. We want to take a demo version with us to Randa, so that's why we are
actually down-under with too many things on this end.

Latest news: I know that we have multimedia working (video and audio) but it
still needs plenty of work on that end. There is one UTF-8 problem which is
driving us crazy ... I can't explain details since I am not a programmer :-)

I am simply not publishing where we exactly stand, because it would involve
many questions and discussions where I cannot answer and Bèrto, who is
coding does not have time.

Who has time to read up can do this on our website:
http://www.voxhumanitatis.org/content/ambaradan-owm2-storage-engine
(here you will still find MySQL mentioned - the system was migrated to
Postgres)
The first page is actually the most relevant one.
If you wish to have all the text on one page, without having to click
through the various chapters:
http://www.voxhumanitatis.org/book/export/html/11

This is also the reason why, right now, I am not pressing to get a converter
for the tables I have - the python scripts and bash commands work fine for
what is needed right now even if I have to make looooong stupid one command
after the other .sh scripts etc.

My own spreadsheets became too large to be digested by google (which
initially was quite comfortable) and that's the reason why I am now working
in OOo base and basically do mainly copy/paste work from data I get in
manually. If anyone has some magic sql command so that I can read in
contents from other tables in my table ... well ... it would be a nice
feature - if not: I just go ahead doing things one by one.

The problem is "getting the data" from people and that is where we have to
make "input" easy for them. Right now, for many particular languages a
google form is the easiest way for me and them to handle.

All for now :-)

Cheers, Sabine

On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 10:09 AM, Frederik Gladhorn <gladhorn at kde.org>wrote:

> Hi,
> I'm currently away and totally out of the loop, so I thought, I'd just
> throw
> in how I think vocabulary should be collected:
> I would like to see it happen as openly as possible, if we don't give
> people
> the possibility to work on it they won't... So I like the wiki approach.
> But I
> think wikis are way to unstructured. It is hard (Sabine had someone who did
> that, and it is overly complex) to get data out of wiktionary for example.
>
> I do not like the idea of using the google applications for several
> reasons. I
> don't think the interface really fits the task - vocabulary is more complex
> that just two word mappings. I think it lacks any of the great advanced
> stuff
> that applications could make use of. And it lacks a way of easily
> structuring
> the data so that it can be split into lessons without major trouble. This
> is
> prone to breaking. Finally I don't like that it's proprietary software. But
> even if there was a free spreadsheet alternative that wouldn't make the cut
> for me.
>
> In my opinion what is needed is a web app (maybe later accessible from
> within
> parley for example because I do not enjoy using web apps most of the time).
> I think the data should be stored in a read database and there should be a
> specific front end that makes it possible to edit vocabulary in a
> meaningful
> way - including grammar things such as word type, conjugations etc.
>
> One more note about books: it is sad, but experience shows that editorials
> that produce school books tend to insist on some silly copyrights for word
> lists because of their meaningful pedagogical arrangement... this seems to
> be
> a gray zone of copyrights... the individual translations are luckily not
> copyrightable (how insane would that be). I only looked into this a bit in
> Europe.
>
>
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