Jeremie suggested I post an intro to the Jabber dev list about a new project. The worldwide lexicon (www.worldwidelexicon.org) is an open source initiative to create a standard procedure for locating and communicating with language services throughout the web (e.g. dictionaries, machine translation servers, and even pools of human translators). Think of this as GNUtella for language services. WWL defines a fairly simple SOAP based interface that allows apps to find and query these services via a small library of SOAP-RPC methods.
What does this have to do with Jabber you might ask? Real-time communication is one of the most interesting applications for this system. By creating a simple client/server interface for talking to these services, WWL will make it easier for developers to build chat clients that provide services such as inline dictionaries, machine translation, and live human translation. The chat client itself can be relatively dumb, and communicates with these services via the SOAP interface. A WWL enabled Jabber client would support three different modes of operation, each of which is useful in different situations. 1) Machine translation mode: the chat client uses WWL to find MT servers that support a specific language pair on the fly. It then uses WWL to send translation requests to these servers, and inserts the translations into the conversation. This is easy to implement (all the chat client does is send queries to remote servers and then copy the results into the conversation). The problem, of course, is that machine translation is often inaccurate. However, it is better than no translation. Also, in a real-time conversation, a user can always retransmit if a message is garbled in transit. 2) Inline dictionary mode: in this scenario, the chat client watches the user as he/she is talking with another user. Each time the user types a new word or phrase, the client attempts to find translations into the other user's language. If the WWL dictionary replies with multiple translations, the chat client prompts the sender to pick the best meaning via a dialog box or extra keystroke. This mode will be useful for people who speak another language, but have a poor vocabulary. The chat client merely assists the user in composing messages in another language. This will also be very useful as a teaching tool/ 3) Human translation mode: the WWL protocol does not care if queries are processed by a machine, or by humans linked to a WWL server via IM. In this mode, the chat client uses the protocol to submit queries to WWL servers that are backed up by human translators. This will typically be run as a commercial service where users pay a metered rate for human assisted translation, and translators (who may be located on the other side of the world) are paid on a per work-unit basis. We are interested in recruiting Jabber developers to create WWL enabled chat/IM clients. The project is at an early stage of development, so there are many opportunities to get involved. There are also some great business opportunities that will result from WWL. One I can envision is a human assisted translation network that allows chat/IM users to communicate with people worldwide. While casual users may not want to pay for translation, the business and government uses for such a system are substantial. To learn more about the Worldwide Lexicon project, visit our website at www.worldwidelexicon.org. Thanks for your time. Brian McConnell, Project Leader _______________________________________________ jdev mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.jabber.org/listinfo/jdev
