This document is vastly outdated; meanwhile, the glossary project has achieved its first fundamental milestone with the the delivery of the W3C Glossary and Dictionary tool.
Since early 2002 I have been thinking and gathering ideas for a project of combined "glossary" and "dictionary" for W3C (see old "requirements" page). This page is a small summary of my findings.
The Glossary is currently seen as a potential interesting / important project, involving horizontal activities, and would be a benefit for all groups.
9 July 2004: a long time has passed, and since then the Glossary project has been officially released (back in September 2003), augmented with new glossaries over time; as of today, it's now using the SKOS Schema produced by the SWAD-EU activity as much as possible, instead of the custom schema it was using until now.
26 March 2003: a first analysis of the project requirements have been published, and a discussion on the data model development has been started.
17 March 2003: as discussed during the meeting during the technical plenary, a publicly archived mailing list (public-glossary@w3.org) has been open; besides, the minutes of this meeting have been published).
5 March 2003: The Glossary will be part of the technical plenary day, in a 30 minutes session about horizontal activities.
7 March 2003: People are invited to gather and start discussing the model (and other technical details) for the Glossary.
February 2003: Pierre Candela will join us to work on this project. Local steering in Sophia will include Daniel, Charles, plus Olivier from Japan. Welcome Pierre!
16 January 2003: Proposal for a glossary session at Tech. Plen. was, among others, discussed at a Global Team meeting [team-only]. Comm (MCF), Office (Ivan), i18n (Martin), SemWeb (Eric Miller) showed some interest and want to be added in the loop in addition to the "usual suspects".
6-7 January 2003 : During the QAWG/IG face-to-face meeting (minutes), the topic was discussed extensively. Participants included Matt and Wendy (bringing their knowledge about the WAI glossary, by far the best thing we have in terms of glossary), QAWG participants, and Olivier (rep. the QAIG).
The idea developed there was that of a glossary scraping system, very similar to the WG markup system developed by Ryan. In order to develop this idea, there is a need to define a model (such as the classes for the WG markup scraping system). The WAI glossary is a good candidate as a model since it's very rich. Note that this differs from the idea of a central repository, instead, groups maintain their own glossary / (or dictionnary, actually, let's not forget the big interest for translations) and the system only takes care of the merging.
The QA Group has decided to try and make a first prototype system by merging the different Glossaries of the QA framework documents into one. Olivier in charge, Wendy in the loop.
December 2002 : After a trip report [team-only], Some discussion [team-only] about a Glossary ontology followed.
November 2002 : I am aware and included in some discussions among WAI participants for the "WAI common glossary". This glossary has been around since the summer of 2000.
Early 2002 : Olivier and Martin discussed the idea of a "central" system allowing people to input definitions and translations for terms used in W3C specs. Olivier starts maintaining a requirements page.
Here is a short list of "similar" work known to me, that I have categorized in 2 categories: "data" and "technologies".
