Faviki is featured on Google Code

Image by Thomas Hawk via Flickr

Faviki is a featured project on Google Code for it’s creative usage of Google AJAX Language API!

This API allows you to translate and detect the language of blocks of text. Despite the fact it has a word “AJAX” in it’s name, the API can be also accessed from non-JavaScript environments.

What is it all about? As we have written recently, Faviki uses Zemanta API to make auto suggestions for tags. That’s OK for English pages, but what about other languages?

They have to be translated first, so Faviki asks Google AJAX Language API for help 🙂 A great thing is that you don’t need to specify the original language, it recognizes it automatically!

Automatic translations made this way are not perfect, but they seem to be good enough for Zemanta to find appropriate concepts from English Wikipedia, which are finally translated again into user language (using DBpedia data about language connections).

So, the whole process looks like this (simplified version):

1. Faviki fetches a web page and extracts a core text (without HTML and non-relevant content).
2. Then it tries to figure out if a content is in English. If it isn’t, it is sent to Google language API, which detects the original language automatically, translates it into English and returns the translation.
3. The content is then sent to and analyzed by Zemanta API, which then finds relevant links. Faviki uses links from English Wikipedia – titles are used as semantic tags.
4. If users language is not English, we must translate them. Using DBpedia datasets “Links to Wikipedia Article” , we can find names of  Wikipedia’s  titles in one of 13 languages. These datasets actually contain the connections between English Wikipedia articles and articles from Wikipedia in other languages.
5. Finally, suggested tags are offered to a user.

Faviki combines three services to make multilingual semantic tags possible. We hope this will help our non English speaking users to tag their bookmarks faster and more easily. These great services will continue improving in time, so expect that the suggested tags will be better, too.

September release: multi-language semantic tagging, private bookmarks, enhanced UI

Faviki is proud to announce the first major upgrade of our service. There are several new features/improvements:

Semantic tagging in 14 languages

Faviki is the first social bookmarking service to offer semantic tagging in various languages! Now users can tag in their own language the same way they have tagged in English.

This is possible thanks to DBpedia, the project which generates datasets containing the information about connections between concepts in English Wikipedia and 13 other language Wikipedias.

Take, for instance, Wikipedia page about ‘Nobel prize’. In German Wikipedia, this page has a title ‘Nobelpreise’ and in Russian Wikipedia – ‘Нобелевская премия’. These page titles act as translated words in a dictionary. If a tag in particular language has no translation, the English term will be used instead.

The system keeps connecting all web pages with English Wikipedia terms, and is able to translate them, thanks to DBpedia datasets. For instance, a Japanese user who has been tagging in English, now with one click can translate his tags into Japanese language. And his friend from France will see the same tags in French.

Beside English, included languages are: German, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Swedish and Finnish.

Private bookmarks

Private bookmarks in Faviki are the bookmarks only you can see.

Tags you’ve added to them are also invisible to others. However, they are used as suggestions when another user saves the same bookmark, and are counted when showing the number of people who saved the link. In both cases, the anonymity is respected.

To make a bookmark private, just check the ‘private’ checkbox on the ‘Edit more’ part in the bookmarklet window. Your private bookmarks will have a small lock icon.

Enhanced UI

The user interface is simplified and (hopefully) improved. Tag clouds are replaced with tag lists containing visual representation of frequencies of tags that can be sorted by name or by count. There is also additional information about related tags.

Thanks to all of our users who have given us the feedback regarding the new features on Faviki.

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