Official ObjectGraph Blog

Thursday, January 20, 2005

WordNet 2.0 almost ready

WordNet 2.0 database is almost ready. Thanks to John Kane for the import programs. You could download the generated SQL files from here if you would like to experiment with them yourself. The database itself contains a lot of information other than just the word, definition, type and usage. I am still working on what information needs to be made available. Performance from the database will also be an interesting thing to watch as now this will query multiple tables (All the other dictionaries were just simple 1 table queries).

Here is an E-R diagram after the import was done. All the wordnet experts out there please validate if i did this correctly.


posted by gavi at 1:40 PM | 0 comments |

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Thesaurus Added
Dictionary has Thesaurus feature. Try it out. Its based on Moby Thesaurus http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/research/ilash/Moby/ It has 30,000 root words with 2.5 million synonyms and related words. Check out the previous versions of the dictionary page to see how it evolved.


posted by gavi at 11:09 PM | 5 comments |

Monday, January 10, 2005

Dictionary listed on Yahoo Directory
I am happy to inform you that our dictionary has been listed on Yahoo's directory. http://dir.yahoo.com/Reference/Dictionaries/ thank you all for making this possible.

posted by gavi at 10:25 PM | 1 comments |

Ternary Search Trees
After reading the excellent article by Ashwin, Now i am thinking of implementing the dictionary database as a ternary search tree. Here is an another link to an atricle on ternary search tree. http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-02-2001/jw-0216-ternary.html I like this approach as you could search for partial matches also. As i started to write scripts to load various dictionaries i found that, each of them have their own unique attributes. For example, the elements dictionary needs to be searched by element name, symbol or atomic number and the english dictionary has word definitions that belong to a type(noun, adjective ..) .This will create unique problems for this type of algorithm, although each of the attributes could be used a key.

posted by gavi at 10:42 AM | 0 comments |

GMail invitations
I have 10 Gmail invitations. Let me know if anyone needs them.

posted by gavi at 10:38 AM | 3 comments |

Friday, January 07, 2005

Elements Dictionary
All the elements from the periodic table is now available. Thanks to Jay F. Kominek for the database. http://ucsub.colorado.edu/~kominek/elements/ you could search the elements by name, symbol or atomic number. Thanks to John Kane for the WordNet scripts. This will be my next task.

posted by gavi at 1:47 PM | 7 comments |

Wednesday, January 05, 2005

WordNet
People are really using the dictionary. Yesterday i had 2200 unique ip addresses, this means i have to include other popular and freely available dictionaries. One of the best ones out there is WordNet. http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/ The word database looks like a lot of text and index files. I need to really understand the relationship before writing scripts to import it in to SQL server.

posted by gavi at 9:01 AM | 6 comments |

Monday, January 03, 2005

Trie Algorithm for dictionary searching
After looking for information about creating an in-memory dictionary search, i came to the conclusion that a tries are the best way to do this. The word trie comes from retrieval, so the algorithm is good for retreival of fixed text (Such as our dictionary). It is good in situations where the time in preprocessing the text is minimal considering it would be offset by very fast retreivals later on. I already have a webserver written during my .NET class . It is a simple multithreaded HTTP server and i think it could be adapted easily to create a dictionary server. This will eliminate the need for a database. This approach is only good for custom purposes like this dictionary project, but when developing a custom ASP.NET web control or something similar, we should stick to standard stuff such as connectivity to traditional database servers etc.

posted by gavi at 9:25 PM | 1 comments |

Sunday, January 02, 2005

Objectgraph listed as a mirror on FOLDOC
I have great news. Denis Howe, The creator/maintainer of the free online dictionary of computing has kindly placed objectgraph's dictionary on FOLDOC's mirror's list. If you would like to try it, just select FOLDOC on the page.

posted by gavi at 6:34 AM | 0 comments |

Saturday, January 01, 2005

Happy New Year
Now the dictionary includes, FOLDOC- The free online dictionary of computing. It has around 14000 computer terms. Try it out.

posted by gavi at 10:48 AM | 5 comments |