<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="MS Exchange Server version 6.5.7654.12"> <TITLE>A multi-languages search engine for OCAL. Your help to finalize it</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY>  Hello, By way of introduction, we (Kevin Albert and André Cotte) are working to make open source software more readily available to school systems in the province of Québec, Canada. We’d like to bring to your attention a project that we have been working on for some time now – in fact the project is quite far advanced – and in particular to point out one of the few remaining obstacles. We’re at the stage where only the OCAL team will be able help us with this problem. Basically the project would allow users to access the OCAL database using the French language with the help of its API and the “Google translate” service. (Our project could be adapted to other languages as well.) We are aware that most of the OCAL keywords (tags) are in English, which presents a problem for students in non-English language countries. We are also aware that the OCAL site makes available a rich API, and so we have come up with the following process for accessing OCAL clipart images in French. The francophone student enters the keyword for the search he wishes to carry out in the question box. Our program delivers this word to the Google translation service, then submits the translation to OCAL. OCAL delivers the result to us, which we transmit to the student. So far, so good. The problem we are encountering in an educational context is not being able to identify via the OCAL API images tagged NSFW. We know that this criterion exists because images are tagged NSFW on the site – but the API does not transmit this value. We have come up with two possible solutions. The first and most simple solution would be for the API to send us directly the NSFW status of an image. This may not be possible because you use CCHost for the API. The second option would be for us to program a mechanism to add the NSFW tag to each of the clipart images for which the NSFW field has already been clicked. Thus the API, in sending back to us the keywords, would immediately identify the NSFW state of the image. We are aware that in asking you to help us solve this problem we are piling another task on what is undoubtedly an already heavy workload. But solving our problem opens the door to making OCAL accessible to grateful users in every language in the world. The program we have designed to access the database in French will be made available with an open source license to people of all languages. There would be no problem making it available on the OCAL site. We thank you for giving our problem your attention, and hope that we will be able to collaborate fruitfully in making OCAL available to a global audience. Your truly, Kevin Albert André Cotte Zone libre en education <A HREF="http://zonelibre.grics.qc.ca">http://zonelibre.grics.qc.ca</A> </BODY> </HTML>