On 30/07/05, Lars Aronsson <lars(a)aronsson.se> wrote:
Oops, Hungarian has two kinds of plural, let's
change the schema.
Oops, Thai has genders for verbs, let's change the schema.
Oops...
The axiom that it "can't be planned for" sounds like a recipy for
failure.
Those things will not need a change in the schema.
Are there indeed any non-free (commercial or research)
projects
that have attempted anything like this? Wikipedia has many
precursors such as Britannica, Brockhaus, etc. And so does
Wiktionary, of course. But which precursors does UW have? What
kind of data model or database schema do they apply? Or is UW a
piece of original research in computational linguistics?
Something was mentioned on Slashdot which just wanted to be a
cross-language dictionary (i.e. not providing definitions as such) but
I doubt they got off the ground. UW puts a lot more in the database
anyway.