Dienstag, 13. März 2012

Numbers

For the first time in OmegaWiki's history, the number of expressions is decreasing. What's happening?

When OmegaWiki started in 2007, the GEMET Environmental Thesaurus (http://www.eionet.europa.eu/gemet) was the very first thing that was imported to fill the database. GEMET has definitions translated into several languages, there are many translations for every expression and even relations like broader terms and narrower terms. So it was a great start to build a dictionary of all words in all languages.

However, there are some problems. Many GEMET entries do not have the correct format. Sometimes synonyms are separated by commas or semicolons, some entries don't have a definition at all and some have a very long definition that is not suitable for a dictionary. There's still a lot of work to do to fix all that.

And then there are the entries that are not suited for a dictionary at all. For example: geographical distribution of population or accumulation in body tissues. These are the kind of DefinedMeanings that I am deleting at the moment. There are quite a lot of them and since every DM has an average of 20 translation, the numbers go down noticeably.