OmegaWiki a translation dictionary? By all means: no

Out of a bar entry on it.wiktionary, yes I was pointed to the bar on it.wikt, I understand that most people see OmegaWiki just as a translation dictionary. But: if you feel like that, then you did not look properly at it.

At this stage entries are not really complete, but they already have a huge part of the complete functionality that is to come. This means we have:

- lemma
- definition (lemma + definition together form a Defined Meaning)

In the annotations you find all additional info like

String properties:
- example sentence
- hyphenation

Text properties:
well: this needs still some work

URL properties:
also here: still some work needed ... this is to link to other projects

Option properties:
- part of speech
- verb
- noun
- adverb
- describing word
- contraction
- article
- pronoun
- preposition
- conjunction
- interjection

Then there are
- Relations – this means to which other words the actual one is related
- Incoming relations – this is which other words relate to the actual one
- Class membership – for now with only "lexical item" in there
- Collection membership – for example: we have, just to name some, the General Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus, Destinazione Italia, OLPC Children's Dictionary, ISO 639-3 languages as collections. A list of present collections and their completion status can be found here.

Under Relations you will find the typical "narrower and wider terms" like you find them in a thesaurus for example.

What is still missing is Etymology – that one is planned, but not there right now – you will find it within the annotations.

So this is the basics of what we have now – and yes, many entries just have lemma + definition + translations, but that depends on the fact that for now we don't have all too many fans who care about the annotations :-)

But OmegaWiki is not only that ... it is already being used to create study material for students and to provide easy to read news articles for many. What does this mean, well the easiest thing is to have a look at two examples:
- http://www.positanonews.it/menu/default.asp?id=6090 for an example in Italan
- http://www.positanonews.it/menu/default.asp?id=6167 for an example in Neapolitan

You will find additional info on this theme and why we work with Positanonews in a former blog of mine: Combining projects just for fun ... and unexpected results. And a list of articles that will grow by one a week is maintained on OmegaWiki.

During the Holland Open Gerard showed the articles to some people and also other universities started about tagging their materials in such a way for their respective students.

This is just one of the many additional uses of the OmegaWiki data – maybe we will explain about the others in a separate post. It would be somewhat an overkill to put all in one article.

There is also another part of the post in the bar on it.wikt that needs an answer ... well people assumed that even if I work mainly on OmegaWiki I don't care about Wiktionary anymore ... that is more a kind of a personal question and not a factual one – so it will be answered separately.