Babel

Some of the earliest writing that has been preserved for us is written on stone, or in baked clay. The writing system used in what was called Mesopotamia, is called the cuneiform script. Much of these clay tablets can be found in museums, collections and in archaeological sites.

Today I came across a really nice website called VirtualSecrets, it provides you with a tool that allows you to translate English into Assyrian/Babylonian, Sumerian and Egyptian. It is a really nice tool and I get the idea that it should be good because museums use this tool as well.

Soldiers of many nations are currently in Mesopotamia, they are bound to bring souvenirs home. Some of them will be original clay tablets. Much of these tablets will be useless without the context where they came from. But given a machine translator, it would be possible to have a text translated from photos.

Photos from the clay tablets in an archive, would make a digital collection. The texts can be translated and with an ever increasing amount of material in such a repository, individual tablets that are currently out of context may fall into place after all.

Thanks,
GerardM

Music and languages, the sound of it

It seems obvious that a language can be associated with its culture. Particularly music provides a nice window on both language and culture. It is really good fun to listen to music from all different parts of the world. With Sabine I have listened and seen much music on youtube. There has been much that I would otherwise never have heard of.

Not knowing the language, you listen to the sound. The language in the music that I heard from Berto, Piedmontese, is so different from Neapolitan. The Neapolitan sounds more like Spanish and Piedmontese is more like what I associate with Tirol. Knowing the geography and some history it makes some sense.

At this moment I really like I Musicatoria. Have a listen, I think you will like it :)

Thanks,
GerardM

Language support in applications

When an application says it supports certain languages, it often means that the application has been localised in these languages. This difference is significant, because many applications are able to support all the languages that have Unicode support.

One of the problems that people have that want to use one of these "other" languages is the ability to just state that they are writing in their own language. The Unicode enabled applications should have a list of all the languages that are supported in Unicode and thereby provide the most basic level of support. This way people are enabled to enrich their document with the right meta data for their language.

Many people would expect that all the official languages of the world are supported in Unicode. This is sadly not the fact. Brianna informed me that several official Indian languages are not fully supported in Unicode.

In order for applications to know what languages they can support on this most basic level, there is a need for a public database that keeps this information up to date. Yes, it would be great if it also includes a link to a font that is needed as well.

Thanks,
GerardM

French sign language in Togo

As so often I am working on completing the ISO 639-3 coverage in OmegaWiki. This time I added fsl or French Sign Language. In the information on Ethnologue it says that it is taught in one school in Togo.

Given the information on Togo, it is the only sign language known. There are no other sign languages that have been recognised and, if this is the case, French Sign Language is certainly as good as any other. However, I can not help but wonder if there are no other sign languages. It seems odd to me that deaf people do not have their own sign language.

When there is a native sign language, it may be that because of the French Sign Language being taught at school this language is marginalised. When however the local language is strong, it may be that this French language is isolated ...

Really, languages are a really interesting subject. :)

Thanks,
GerardM

Inspiration for working on content in OmegaWiki

When you are working on a wiki, you want to make sure that the work you do has relevance. Certainly when there is much content to be added, it is not difficult to find more to add. When you add the right words, the content gains relevancy for some constituency of a project.

At Wikimania I showed that we are supporting with real time semantic support for Wikipedia. The information that it uses is content that exist in all the databases of OmegaWiki. This means that when you look in one of the articles in this dump of the English language Wikipedia, you will find many concepts that do not yet exist. When you add these concepts, the Semantic Support will only become better once we have the process of updating the new terminology implemented.

Another way it is stimulating is that the existing concepts exist mostly in the UMLS database. In order to start providing Semantic Support for other languages, we need translations. This is done by creating a DefinedMeaning in the Community Database and linking it to the UMLS database.

It turns out that we already have a number of languages that are really doing well considering that we have mapped almost 4% of the records of the Community Database.

Thanks,
GerardM

micropledge.com

Erik Moeller wrote on his blog "Micropledge.com & paying for free culture". In many ways it is a really nice idea. All the Micropledge projects as they currently listed have one big failing, they do not state how much money is needed for any of the projects.

Erik proposed and probably pledged some money for a project called "RSS extension for namespaces with smart quality filtering". Twenty dollars have been pledged (US / Canadian / Taiwan it does not say..) and two people bothered to comment on the project .. they like it :) . I however would not pledge money to it as it is completely unclear how much money is needed for this job.

Micropledge is a young project and it deserves a chance. So I asked the CTO of Open Progress to come up with a budget that would allow an expensive developer to do the job. Some money would also be set aside for the necessary overhead. The point is not that Open Progress wants to do this job, the point is that there will be at least one Micropledge project that has a target amount associated with it.

In many projects like Rentacoder, you can post a project and developers can bid for the project. I sincerely hope that a good developer will want to do the job and will do it for less then the amount we will post. Bidding for projects is however not something that Micropledge caters for at this moment in time.

When in the end it turns out that enough money has been pledged, Open Progress will do the job. For us it is an experiment as well. Will posting a realistic amount of money get more pledges, will we in the end be asked to do the job ??

Thanks,
GerardM

Court Rules: Novell owns the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights! Novell has right to waive!

Groklaw reports some of the best news. We owe a debt of gratitude to Novell for defending the GPL and for fighting the shameless opportunism of the people that came new to SCO.

Thanks,
GerardM

Equipment for an Internet traveller on the cheap

So you get on a plane and land somewhere outlandish. You have your instructions on how to get to your hotel and then what.. Well, you get want to get back on the Internet. You brought your power adapter, and an extension block and all the stuff you need to load the battery of your phone, your PDA and what not.

Your PC does not pick up a network, so you get out your Meraki router and with the extra long distance antenna you have you find a Fon network. A Ethernet cable is welcome, it allows you to reconfigure the Meraki if need be. When you are in luck, the hotel provides you with WIFI but with you own router, you can connect to your preconfigured network and connect a bit more securely to your own network and move from there.

Before you leave the hotel, you check again the position of the hotel on your GPS system, you take your directions and move to your destination. With some luck you have the GPS location of your destination and off you go. The good news of the GPS is that even when you cannot read the street signs, you know have a tool that tells you if you are getting closer or getting further away from your destination, it beats getting a cab to get to your destination.

Typically you do not bring a T-shirt to sleep in, when you are really lucky you have a new clean one for every night of your stay.. T-shirt, proof of: “been there, done that”.

Thanks,
GerardM

WiktionaryDev

WiktionaryDev was pointed out to me and there is much to like. I really like the fact that they brought some tables to the party. The system now knows when there is content in a language. I experimented a bit and added both the word Cherokee and a word in that language.

Superb is the possibility to indicate that two labels indicate content in the same language, this brings the content of Greek and Greek (modern) for instance under the same heading. Having indexes for each language is really powerful; it allows people that are interested to work on one specific language.

The WiktionaryDev functionality builds upon the standards that were adopted in the en.Wiktionary. It is absolutely fabulous that the hard work of standardising Wiktionary results in all this new functionality.. :)

Thanks,
GerardM

Licenses are often not even a nice pain

Many people produce content and many people collaborate on such content. They have a reason to do so, they want to make their work available to the work so that select a license. Often, this content is produces as an extra to something else.

You would create a spell checker under the GPL, but it is incompatible with the GFDL, the CC-by-sa ... You would create a machine translation engine under the GPL ...

The best reason for selecting a Free or Open license for software is because you want to ensure that the freedoms will remain available to the people who receive the programs downstream. In essence it is a defensive measure using copyright law.

Facts are different from programs. You cannot copyright facts. You can copyright collections of facts. Large collections of facts are available under a Free / Open license and these are incompatible with other Free / Open licenses. This means that you either take these collections and just use them, or you get into long discussions about licenses. Either option has its issues.

When you get into discussions about licenses, you have to indicate that the license does not liberate the facts for use in another setting. People get really grumpy even upset when they are told that their favourite Open or Free license is the issue.

The worst thing happens when you are asked to cooperate on a project. A project that has obvious merits. You are asked to help out because you know the subject matter. You are asked to help and comply with their license. You are asked to collaborate for free but you are not permitted to use your own work. When you then tell these people that you do not want to collaborate because their Free / Open license is an issue, you first get stunned silence and disbelief and then you get the same old religious arguments why their license is best. To me licenses are only great if you belief in the copyright system. I believe the copyright system is evil.

In OmegaWiki, we make our community data available under a combined license, CC-by and GFDL. In this way we reach out to both the Free and the Open communities. The people that use our data downstream can pick either license or when their license is more restrictive, they can even re licence our data. Our data will remain Free / Open. People can come back to us and improve and append our data and from OmegaWiki it will be available to the people who use the data downstream.

We are happy to cooperate with anyone. We are happy to collaborate on any database of facts but we have to insist that we work in our community environment. Facts need to be liberated and be available to all. This notion I learned from the people I met in the Open Access world.

Thanks,
GerardM

Happy news

This article on the BBC-news website had me smile. It is excellent news and it indicates a big milestone towards a Free Culture.

Congratulation to all the people who are involved and make it happen :)

Thanks,
GerardM

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

The amount of e-mails on the Wikimedia mailing lists has been somewhat less the last days. I expect that many, like myself, have enjoyed or are enjoying the latest tome by JK Rowlings. It is a great time sink. If I would have been smart I would have saved it for the plane to Taipei... Resistance was futile.

Thanks,
GerardM

Ishi could have spoken Coos

According to a study from 1962 there were two people in Oregon who spoke Coos. It is not an unreasonable assumption that in 2007 nobody speaks Coos any more. Suppose that Ishi had some profound things to say; his message was recorded and it was recorded on a wax cylinder in 1911.

So let us consider this situation. Ishi spoke Coos, his language is now extinct and he used the technology of the day and left a recording of his message. We do not speak the language any more and we have problems with technology less than hundred years later. This wax cylinder is owned by the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology and we might be lucky; there could be a complete set of annotations including translation of Ishi's words. When we are lucky, we can listen to the the Ishi recording 96 years later and have some understanding through the possible annotation; a window is opened in our past.

When Ishi had spoken his message in English, we would consider it to be easier for us to understand it. The message would still be from a different culture, it would still require the same annotations for us to understand it properly. Now Bill who was also living in Oregon, had an as profound message. Suppose Ishi and Bill knew each other, Ishi's background would be Coos, and Bill's background would be Welsh. Our ability to understand their true message would depend on our understanding of that time. Without sufficient understanding of the culture, the profound message of either Bill or Ishi will not reach us. It would be an artefact of a museum, an artefact to be studied.

For Bill and Ishi it might have been of great significance that their profound message was recorded. For Ishi it would be natural to communicate in Coos, it was his language and it is not unlikely that is was only recorded and annotated because it was Coos. Bill's message was not recorded, his English and his message was not considered of similar significance.

Much of what is said and done, is done only for the present moment. My message is written in English because it is the best way for me to convey my message. Many of the messages of Sabine are in Neapolitan when she reaches out to that particular audience. My message is written on Blogger, I do not spend much thought considering its format. If at all, it may be saved for posterity thanks to the effort of the Internet Archive. When people cannot read it, understand it in 100 years time, I do not really mind as they are not my intended audience.

Much of what we do on our Wikis is for our current audience. Our content is transient, its shelf life is limited. We aim to bring information to our public and we to do this now. We provide Free content and when a wealth of content is available in a format like Flash, we should imho provide it because we aim to provide the best possible service now. With the continued development of Gnash, I feel reasonably safe that a future generation will still be able to experience some of what our day and age is about. The stuff that I really enjoyed.. well that is another story.. some people try to preserve it..

Thanks,
GerardM

Ishi meets IRENE

Ishi was a native American who was recorded in 1911 on a wax cylinder. It is unique authentic material and reproducing the sound can deteriorate the wax cylinder. There are many such recordings and for those who have an interest in such things the invention of IRENE is absolutely fabulous.

IRENE is a method that in stead of a needle uses a camera to find all the little grooves in the track. With this information it is able to emulate what a needle would find and, play the music. There are many priceless recordings and it will be great when they are digitised. This will ensure that they are less likely to get lost.

Obviously, given the age of this material, is it all public domain.

Thanks,
GerardM

Today's word of the day: hypoxia

An article on the BBC news website informs you about the dead zones of the Gulf of Mexico. There are several reasons why I like the word hypoxia. The first is that this word is not part of the GEMET thesaurus while it is a genuine term that deals with the environment. OmegaWiki, does know the term and as such it shows that an interested community can add value to a resource that is considered to be authoritative.

The sad thing about hypoxia is that it is preventable. Hypoxia was a phenomena that happened in the Wadden Sea as a result of the pollution that came in from the Rhine. As a result of cleaning up this river, the hypoxic areas or dead zones have diminished, the areas where seagrass is growing are on the rise again. The same could happen with the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. The main things required is the prevention of nitrate and phosphate getting into the waterways. It is well known how this can be done, it just takes the political will to make this happen.

My interest in this subject can be understood from the fact that I wrote most of the articles about the fresh water fish of the Benelux on the Dutch Wikipedia.

Thanks,
GerardM

Copyfraud

There is an interesting read about copyfraud on slashdot, it refers to a paper published by the Social Science Research Network. I have been reading this paper now for some time and it does a good job at explaining the problems with the copyright claims of works that are in the public domain. The issue is very much that as the paper explains nobody cares about what is technically an offence.

Organisations that deal in copyfraud are legally fraudsters. While reading this paper one question that comes up to me is, how can industries that do not implement the law themselves on such a massive scale expect their customers to respect the law ?

The paper informs of the many ways it prevents people to use material that is public domain. There have been many threads on the WMF mailinglists about this subject and it is quite clear that our projects would benefit enormously from a strengthened public domain.

This paper does address the issue of how the public domain can be strengthened, it mentions among other things that courts ruled that those with dirty hands because of the assertion of copyright on public domain material were denied copyright enforcement.

Industry protects its copyright through organisations that represent them. With an industry massively breaking the law by claiming copyright where it is not theirs to claim, the moral footing of their representatives is undermined. There is legislation where the court denied copyright enforcement to copyright owners with unclean hands. Many industries have engaged in the implementation of digital rights management. These implementation do not take into consideration the fact that copyrights expire. Consequently I would argue that these implementations are broken by design and consequently they are not a legal correct implementation of copyright restrictions. I think it could also be argued that combined with the massive copyfraud perpetrated by the industry copyright enforcement should not be allowed because of the fraudulent behaviour of these industries by organisations representing the whole of an industry.

Thanks,
GerardM

Deletions of pictures

At one time I was a prolific writer on Wikipedias. This was when there was no Commons yet. At the time all pictures had to be present at the individual wikis in order to be seen. In 2004, we won the Prix Ars Electronica and I received an e-mail off to the organisation behind this price; we got permission to use their logo with our articles. There was a restriction that it was to be used with an article about the price, price winners. A reasonable restriction because we are talking about their logo, their trade mark.

I have had two instances now of people insisting on deleting this logo because it is not Free. It will be probably be deleted from the Dutch Wikipedia where the information about the permission is documented and it will after this be deleted from the English Wikipedia because the reference for the permission will no longer be readable.

There are several issues that I want to raise. Commons is as far as I am concerned not as good as it could be because it does not have a way to deal with a restrictive use of logos of organisations that allow for the use of their organisation within the limitations that they have to insist on because of it being part of a trademark.

Permissions given on one project, are often referred to on another. This is not considered when the licenses of pictures are evaluated. This is understandable because there is so much. Much of the older material does not have all the templates and doodahs because these did not exist at the time. The consequence is that much is lost because of this insistence on the compliance with later policies.

For the photos I made, I do not care too much if they are kept on projects or not. Everybody can make a photo of a building, an animal ... The problem is with material that is of benefit to our projects that we do not consider because it requires licenses that are by necessity restrictive. Restrictive in a way that even the organisation that puts the restriction on cannot help.

One additional benefit for accepting a license for logos and stuff would be that as a result our own logos would no longer have a "status aparte" on Commons.

Thanks,
GerardM

Proposal: localisation sure but enable languages first !!

The Pan African L10N had a conference in Morocco in February. I learned about it through a blog I read today. I am really happy with the progress that is reported on of more languages being supported. I am however coming more and more to the conclusion that there is a need for a stage before actual localisation that will provide a service to the bilingual people of a language.

At this stage, the support of a language is very much an all or nothing affair. There is a localisation or there is nothing. This is not how it needs to be. When a language is known to exist, the lowest level of support for that language is the acknowledgement that this language exists. This is currently not done, and I think it is a missed opportunity.

The first thing to consider is, what languages and linguistic entities exist and, how do you support this. This is a surprisingly complex question. Languages are recognised in the ISO 639 standard. There are several versions of the standard and not all languages have a script that is supported in Unicode. Even when a script is supported in Unicode, it does not mean the an associated font is available for a language. The consequence of these two points is that a subset is needed on computer. On the other hand the currently recognised versions of the ISO 639 do not recognise orthographies or dialects or other entities that make a difference to how documents are to be supported.

This is not an issue the organisations that develop and localise software want to tackle. For them this a distraction. Deciding what linguistic entities can be supported is something that is best addressed by one organisation that exists to deal with issues like these. The World Language Documentation Centre (WLDC) is that organisation. Through its association with Geolang and because its board of experts in many of the relevant fields, it is already in a prime position to the research that goes into the development of the ISO 639-6.

With the WLDC and Geolang able to provide researched and verified information about linguistic entities that can be safely supported, it is then up to the applications to at least acknowledge the existence and allow a user to create content in that language. As more information becomes available, spell checkers can be added specific to that linguistic entity. In this way slowly but surely the functionality grows without the need to first localise the application.

In a way this is a solution for a "chicken and egg" problem. This problem is solved when you think of it in an evolutionary way. First there was the egg, the support of the language, and then the chicken evolved, the localisation of the application.

Thanks,
GerardM

Paypal

I have postponed it long enough, I need to be able to pay abroad and, I have to be able to pay to and receive money from outside of Europe as well. To me this is not a straight forward affair. In Europe it is not customary to pay by credit card and, transferring money within the EU does cost nothing or, it costs as much as a national transfer.

Credit card payments cost money, paypal payments cost money. I would expect that credit card payments are more expensive and it seems customary that you pay your paypal bill with a credit card as well. I have the option to pay a paypal bill directly with my checking account. Intuitively this seems to be the option that is less expensive. So I have opted for this.

The question I am left with is how paypal compares with transferring money using traditional banking methods. As paypal exists for some time now, I am sure it will have had an effect on the banks. Paypal benefits from ubiquitous Internet and highly automated procedures, these benefits are available to banks as well...

One of these days I will know the answer to these questions.

Thanks,
GerardM

PS Yes, I am going to Taiwan :)

Finaly, Ariana may stay

I know Ariana for many years, I see her every so often. She is a nice bright woman, a registered nurse and a university student. She is also from Kosovo and escaped the atrocities of war and fled to the Netherlands.

When Ariana got her nursing diploma she was not allowed to work, she was a refugee. After many years she finally got her permit to stay in the Netherlands. Many of the people that know Ariana have been appalled by the, in our eyes un-just, policies of the Dutch government. Not only my mother was willing to provide her with a sanctuary and sabotage these loathed policies that deal with refugees.

I am happy that Ariana can stay and now has more of a future. It is a shame that she has had to suffer all these years of uncertainty and doubt that have added to an already troubled past.

Thanks,
GerardM