I’m a little late reporting on these news, as I currently have to deal with my Civilian service in Austria. But here it is, better late than never.
There is a new way on Factolex to organize your own lexica. As you know, you can categorize your lexicon using tags in very useful ways: Just click on a tag in the tagcloud to filter your lexicon just to display these terms.
Now you can specify a title and a comment for tags that carry a special meaning for you thus creating their own (sub)lexicon.
Using the “Add lexicon” link on the top right of your lexicon, you can oranize your tags and also define tags to be their own lexicon. As you can see on the screenshot, we have also added a way to see how many terms and facts you have, also if you have lexica in multiple languages (as I do).
Completing the updates, we have also revamped the start page a little to display a broader selection of what Factolex has to offer.
The principle of Factolex is to explain terms using multiple facts. But these facts are not the only properties that define a term.
Oftentimes terms have more than one name. We used to call these additional names aliases, but from now on we call them synonyms. Wikipedia uses redirects to imply that a term has multiple names, but we do it differently.
Examples for multiple names for a term could be local spellings (Whiskey as spelled in Ireland vs. Whisky as it is spelled in Scotland) or local names (Vienna is called Wien in German).
An elegant aspect of Factolex directly attaching synonyms to a term, is that the synonym can contain an explanation why it actually is a synonym.
This is different from Wikipedia where it can happen to you that you land on a certain article through a redirect and only then have to figure out why you have been redirected and also why it is a valid redirect.
Today we introduced a new interface (see the screenshot below or live on Factolex) for adding and modifying term titles, modeled along the behavior of facts. You can select the synonyms that fit for the term and reorder them according to priority.
A further problem that we are facing — as we also use Wikipedia to build up our term basis: on Wikipedia sometimes multiple terms are enclosed within one longer article. On Factolex we need to create new terms from these entries that are can currently appear as synonyms. We will present a solution for that soon.
Austria's capital city with a population of about 1.7 million (2.3 million within the metropolitan area), it is by far the largest city in Austria as well as its cultural, economic, and political center
a computer program that interacts with a host application (a web browser or an email client, for example) to provide a certain, usually very specific, function "on demand"
a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world
You have probably seen that we use Google Maps for displaying terms that have a geolocation (such as cities, countries, etc).
There is an open source alternative to Google Maps, called OpenStreetMap where everyone can help updating the map data. The project has gone a long way and already provides pretty solid data. It makes sense to give control to the users over the data. Everyone knows his neighborhood better than some place in another country. And third parties who provide data for Google Maps just don’t live in everyone’s neighborhood.
So it’s like OpenStreetMap is a perfect fit to Factolex. But the interface of Google Maps is pretty much unrivaled in my opinion. So we simply decided to combine the best of both worlds, as it is described in an article in the OpenStreetMap Wiki.
Take the not-so-well known small city of Cham in Germany, and let’s compare Google Maps to OpenStreetMap:
vs.
There you go, quite a difference. As indicated on the top right of the screenshots, you can still switch to Google data if you come across an area that is not covered that well in OpenStreetMap.
Generally, a fact is defined as something that is true, something that actually exists, or something that can be verified according to an established standard of evaluation
The short facts make Factolex a natural fit with Twitter. So you can now ask Factolex for explanations of terms.
The procedure looks like this:
Go to http://twitter.com/factolex and follow the user factolex. This is so that we can reply to you via direct message.
Send a term by sending a Twitter message like @factolex Term
As quickly as possible, you will receive a direct message as reply.
During the process we will follow your Twitter user, so that from the first message on, you can ask Factolex via direct message as well: d factolex Term
In your user settings you can claim a Twitter user to your account, and also change a few settings:
You can configure Factolex in a way so that all terms that your search through Twitter will be saved to your lexicon, so that you can find it later when you’re back to your computer.
Give it a try! We use it internally a lot, in many situations this is the quickest way to ask Factolex for an explanation.
Over New Year, Nader did some design refreshments to Factolex. Though the changes might look a little subtle, they considerably improve the visual appearance and the usability of the page.
First, look at the old version of the front page:
Now the header has changed and the sidebar doesn’t consist of boxes anymore.
On the term page, the most important options were pulled together into a single, useful box:
Of course we will continue to improve design and usability, but this marks a pretty good milestone on the way.
New feature at Factolex: In the sidebar of each term, there now is a new checkbox:
It allows you to quickly add a term to your lexicon without having to check multiple facts.
Even more important, I think, is the function that the checkbox lets you actually hide a term from your lexicon. If you want to vote on certain facts but actually want to refrain from putting it in your lexicon, simply uncheck the box.
Your votes will still be there, but it won’t show up in your lexicon.
Actually it’s a bit wrong to call him a new user. Factobot is rather a computer program that I have written. It helps out with defining terms at Factolex.
We all know that we have this great Encyclopedia on the web: Wikipedia. It would be foolish trying to create an entire new lexicon ignoring its existence. That’s why I have created Factobot.
So there you go, try and search for anything on Factolex. Should we not already have the term defined, Factobot will go ahead and fill in some basic facts.
Still we encourage you add facts that are not yet covered. Factobot is far from being capable of grasping all important facts about a term, so we still need your help!
After all, I hope it Factobot enables you to find some information on any term right away.
vs. 
