OpenMind Common Sense / ConceptNet: Welcome!

For years we've enjoyed tens of thousands of good contributions of from our users, in terms of knowledge and ratings. So we thought that it's about time our users get some feedback from us. This blog is one way that you'll get to hear about what's going on with the site (like, why was it down?) and also see some of the ways that we're using the data you've been giving us.

So first, status: a batch of particularly malicious spam by one or two people hit our site two weeks ago. Since at the time we didn't have some of our spiffy tools quite ready, we decided to pull it down until the code monkeys caught up. To push them along, we went ahead and deployed the new version of the site, now powered by Python and Django.

We're still working hard to get everything working with the new framework. Some cool stuff is already available:

1. The site is now available in multiple languages! There's two parts to that: the user interface of the website itself, and the actual common sense data in the database. We have a snapshot of the Portuguese database collected by our Brazilian collaborators, and are starting projects in Dutch, French, and possibly Arabic.
2. Ratings are now much easier. Thumbs-up if it's good as-is. Thumbs-down if it's spam, nonsense, not something that any 10-year-old would know, or just not true. Yellow flag (meaning "Fix") if it would be true after some changes -- fixing grammar or spelling, or adding a qualifier ("sometimes", "occasionally").

Have fun with the new ratings system! We'll turn adding assertions back on real soon (though "Open Mind wants to know..." will take a bit longer).

back to coding,
-Ken
(a 1st-year Masters student... more later)