Open dictionaries are excellent examples of open knowledge projects. Whether monolingual or bilingual, and whether dealing with definitions, etymology, translation or pronounciation – they can often be large, collaborative undertakings.

Dictionary databases have a wide variety of potential applications – from education and research to machine translation and integration with software applications and services.

We’ve listed several open dictionary projects and packages on CKAN:

• http://ckan.net/tag/read/dictionary

These include:

• http://ckan.net/package/read/freedict
  • Currently offers 69 bilingual dictionaries released under the GPL.
• http://ckan.net/package/read/xdxf
  • Currently includes over currently 308 dictionary files in various languages published in XML format. All material is under the GPL.
• http://ckan.net/package/read/apertium-all
  • Offers a variety of dictionaries with over 20 different language pairs. Material is under the GPL, the GFDL and the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license.
• http://ckan.net/package/read/wiktionary
  • The Wikimedia Foundation’s dictionary project – currently including over 5 million entries in over 170 languages.
• http://ckan.net/package/read/k12-open-dictionary
  • A project to build a basic public domain dictionary for children.
• http://ckan.net/package/read/oed
  • Scans of the first several volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary (the portion which has fallen into the public domain). It would be great to have a machine-readable version of this!
• http://ckan.net/package/read/ding
  • A German-English dictionary with over 216,000 entries. Under the GPL.
• http://ckan.net/package/read/eurfa
  • A Welsh-English, English-Welsh dictionary with over 13,000 entries. Under the GPL.
• http://ckan.net/package/read/jmdict
  • A Japanese-Multilingual dictionary available under a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license.
• http://ckan.net/package/read/open-thesaurus
  • A set of thesauri in 8 different languages under the GPL.

We’d like to start using tags to correspond with the ISO 639-2 codes for the representation of names of languages, such as:

• http://ckan.net/tag/read/language-eng
• http://ckan.net/tag/read/language-dut

If you know of any other open dictionary projects – we’d love to hear about them! You can either pop us a line to the okfn-discuss list, or add packages directly to CKAN:

• http://ckan.net/