cornucopia - Another mobile offline dictionary

Started by zz85, 14. June 2007, 17:07:48

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zz85

http://cornucopia.sourceforge.net/

Stumbled on this project while posting the digg article on DFM. They seem to share the same purpose as DFM, but its has not been updated for about a year. I see there are 3 developers on their sf project page. Maybe we should ask if they like to help DFM, so that there will not be a waste of resources.

here's an extract from their webpage.

QuoteHi!
Cornucopia (meaning) is an Offline Dictionary for Mobile Phone's/PDA's and similar resource constrained devices. It works on anything that supports MIDP 1.0 or above, constrained only by the maximum jar-file size supported by the platform.

Cornucopia was born out of a need. Authors of cornucopia are very frequent users of WordWeb and believe that it is the best lexicon around. But when searching for something similar that runs on mobile phones, they were disappointed. Hence it was decided to make one, that needed just MIDP 1.0 and nothing else. Also it was decided that it will not be an english only lexicon, but rather a bi-lingual one, as it was not a difficult thing to do both in terms of programming effort and content availability.

The first choice that was to be made, was on the selection of the base database, as a dictionary is only as good as its content. WordNet was selected as the base primarily because it is also the base of authors' favourite WordWeb lexicon and secondly because it was available under GPL.

But there were some major hurdles to be crossed. First, how was such a big database going to be managed on such a small device and second how to search this database for fast and efficent retrieval. This was a challange and the authors decided to take it and make conucopia a reality. Making it bi-lingual was considered secondary as neither the search nor storage strategy needed to be changed much once they were efficient enough to handle WordsNet's database.

After some thinking and testing the authors are proud to release Cornucopia (release name aurora) which has all the words and their meanings as contained in WordNet's database. The design has been documented enough that anyone who wishes to extend it can do it in minimum time. Authors request all of you to participate as much as possible by adding more databases to it, improving its UI design, improving its searching algorithms and by adding more bi-lingual conversion dictionaries to it.

Thanks and have a great time...!!!

Gert

I already sent them an email some time a go and asked for co-operation between out projects. Never received a reply !

Gert