A Web Service For PWLs?

Dwayne wrote the following in the comments of a previous post:

Glad to see your rolling this into a spec. I'm so tired of OOo and Mozilla and everything else using different spell checkers and differrent PWLs. I am also very interested in spell checking and related themes. At Translate.org.za we've developed spell checkers of varying quality :) for the 11 official languages of South Africa. I'd like to know what we need to supply to get languages guessing working in Sonnet for those languages. Can you write a blog entry on what you need? One thing I would love is that users can submit their personaly dictionaries for possible inclusion into the formal dictionary. Every time someone adds a word to a personal dictionary there is a chance that it should go into the official one. We could create a poweful network of dictionary improvers.

Let me explain exactly what is happening. The spec on freedesktop.org (which has yet to be written) defines common interfaces for spell checking engines. The various spelling engines need to provide an interface conforming to the spec, or since they don't, we provide a wrapper.

The spec doesn't create a new spelling engine. However, it seems the dictionaries Translate.org.za provides are in myspell format. If installed, the Myspell plugin for Enchant would use them. It does this transparently, calling Enchant (or some spell checker that uses it) with "af_ZA" just works. Of course, Sonnet can detect Afrikaans. So in KDE4 you won't even need to set the language; the document will just start using the relevant dictionary.

Now Dwayne's second question is much more interesting. There should be someway to harness the collective power of all KDE (or even a more broad category of) users personal word lists and aggregate them. This is a great project for someone to pick up. I might even get the itch if I could finish all the projects I've started first.

I envision a website with some standard interface that would allow you upload wordlists for a particular language. A client for KDE could be made that queries Sonnet and retrieves your pwls. You could then download aggregations of words based of some criteria. For example, "Get every word with more than 5 instances in fr_FR." This could then be merged with your own list or be kept separate. The client could do this all seamlessly.

This would provide valuable data to those who study the addition of new words into a language. This could also be used to create dictionaries for languages which currently don't have them. Provided of course, that the language is sufficiently analytic.

EDIT: I just came across Joukahainen. A Finnish web application that is quite similar to what I describe. It's GPL so someone might be able to use it to create my vision.