MOEDICT PROJECT

TitleMOEDICT PROJECT
Product / ServiceMULTILINGUAL CROWDSOURCED DICTIONARY PROJECT
CategoryA01. Innovative Technology (incl. standalone solutions not in association with a brand or creative campaign)
EntrantG0V Taichung City, CHINESE TAIPEI
Entrant Company G0V Taichung City, CHINESE TAIPEI
Advertising Agency G0V Taichung City, CHINESE TAIPEI

Credits

Name Company Position
Audrey Tang G0V G0Ver/Programmer/Project initiator
Ping Yeh G0V G0Ver/Programmer/Project initiator
Yi jun Chen G0V G0Ver/Programmer
Liang-Bin Hsueh G0V G0Ver/Programmer
Kang-min Liu G0V G0Ver/Programmer
Chia-liang Kao G0V G0Ver/Programmer
Kuang-che Wu G0V G0Ver/Programmer
TonyQ Wang G0V/noema.io G0Ver/Programmer
Pierre Magistry G0V G0Ver/Programmer
Zhe min Lin G0V G0Ver/Programmer
Yuanhsiang Cheng G0V G0Ver/Programmer
Hsu Li-Wen G0V G0Ver/Programmer
Chien Guan-tin G0V G0Ver/Programmer
Yo-An Lin G0V G0Ver/Programmer
Mu-An G0V G0Ver/Programmer
caasi Huang G0V G0Ver/Programmer/Copywriter
Jerry Lee G0V G0Ver/Programmer
Yan you Chen G0V G0Ver/Director/Copywriter
Yi jun Chen G0V G0Ver/Designer/Animator
Lin-Hsien Wang G0V G0Ver/Narration/Copywriter

The Brief

Taiwan is one of the few places that is stilll using Traditional Chinese as its official language. The Minstry of Education has a duty to preserve it. But the online version of Revised Edition of Mandarin Chinese Dictionary and other dictionaries supported by the MoE are hard to use. In the early 2013, Dr. Yeh -- one of many early evangelists of open source movement -- started a project in the sencond g0v hackathon. And later it became the Moedict. Moedict adapted latest technologies developed by open source communities like React.js, postcss. Guide by audreyt, many g0vers use their cognitive surplus cooperate on this project. Thanks to open source evangelists. Those technologies are familiar to geeks in Taiwan. The government started its open data policy in 2012. Moedict shows how to organize and improve legacy data sets in about one year. And it plays a critical role to make the ministry of education licensed the Revised Edition of Mandarin Chinese Dictionary under Creative Commons. This project is public release.

The long-term goal is to support as many languages as possible. And become a good tool for teachers and self-learners. MoeDict altered the Mandarin, Taiwanese, Hakka teaching way in schools and internet. Users are able to look up for pronunciation,stroke order and evolution of the character.The dictionary could also performed as Taiwanese,Hakka, Mainland dictionaries. Cleaning up the Chinese data set, making applications in many platforms; cleaning up the Taiwanese Hokkien data set; cleaning up the English, German and French data set; cleaning up the Amis data set. the MoedictDoDo(Dictionary debug by Crowdsourcing ), the Hanzi Fusion Reactor(Words association) in Yahoo! Hack Day. In 18 days, we continued working on crowdsourcing programs. Within 53 hours, we made 82,180 Amis words digital. Monthly , we can reach over 6,000,000 visitors with over 400,000 downloads from different operation systems(Android、Firefox OS、Desktop XUL、Windows 8、Symbian etc).

Chinese characters in old bitmap format are picked and listed in spreadsheets, so netizens can help us recognize them. This kind of user generated contents become the cornerstone of high quality data set. Then we can follow what Tim Berners-Lee suggested in "5 ★ Open Data"(http://5stardata.info/). By using unique URIs, different languages(Chinese, Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka Chinese, English, French and German) hyperlink with each other. Live voices, stroke animations, idioms, proverbs also make the Revised Edition of Mandarin Chinese Dictionary easier to use. It's an innovation project. kcwu, audreyt and lead contributors of each language project control the technology stack. We will keep add more and more languages like Tibetan, Japanese, and Russian in this project. This project received no investment.