Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Logos dictionary

The Logos dictionary is one of my favourite resources on the Internet. I know the people well, I respect their work and their dedication, I even worked there for a month.

Logos has the ambition to make their resource the premier lexical resource on the Internet. They work hard on it and, I regret that we are not working together. We are not working together because the basis for cooperation needs to be very much a more wiki way of doing things. The software Logos uses does not provide a Wiki environment and the structure of the database does not allow for functionality that I would expect. This is one reason why we have persisted in developing OmegaWiki.

One issue that prevented cooperation was a license. the Logos dictionary did not have one, all it had was a copyright statement. This was fixed at the time, a GFDL license was added to the copyright. This means that all of the data was and has always been copyright Logos.

Sadly I became aware that Logos has removed the license information. Being the copyright holder to all the data they are allowed to do this. For collaborators and users of the Logos dictionary it is now less clear what the status is of this data. When you translate the Logos "Quote of the Day", are you entitled to attribution for instance ... ??

Facts cannot be copyrighted, collections of facts can be copyrighted. Really, without a license it is less clear what you can do with the data that is and has been for such a long time been freely available on the Internet. Be advised that this resource is older than any of the licenses that are currently so popular..

Really I love to collaborate with anyone but I would especially love to collaborate with Rodrigo, Cinzia, Gianni and Magdalena..

Thanks,
GerardM

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