Thursday, December 05, 2013

#PanLex - its advisory board

PanLex is a system that is being developed by The Long Now Foundation. PanLex aims to help express any lexical concept (such as “democracy”, “elongate”, “à la carte”, or “Africa”) in any language. Its aim is to preserve language diversity.

I have been asked to be on its Advisory Committee and I have accepted. After an initial conversation they considered me to be affiliated with Wikidata. I am happy with that; they approached me originally because of my involvement with OmegaWiki.

My hope is that information that exists in the Panlex system will find its way into Wikidata. By including information in Wikidata, all this lexical wealth gets a new application. It will open up any and all information that Wikidata connects to. Given that the PanLex information is linked to DBpedia, it should not be that hard.

For me language diversity is enabling its use. The objective of the Wikimedia Foundation is to share in the sum of all knowledge. The objective of the PanLex project is to promote language diversity. My hope is to bring these two organisations together because together they can do so much more.
Thanks,
     GerardM

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