MediaGlyphs Project - Credits and Terms of use

Credits and Terms of use

Project name:
The word Mediaglyphs was first introduced by Neal Stephenson in his sciencefiction novel "The diamond age".
We are trying to make his vision become reality.
Creators:
The MediaGlyphs project is conceived and directed by Giuseppe Insana. Those who contributed or still contribute theoretical and practical assistance to the project are:
- Cheng Dong Seon; Sheng Kuang; Geoff; Stupka, Elia; Gelio, Giovanni: discussion, testing, suggestions
- Sheng Kuang; Wang Ya Hsuan; Yang Shang Jiong: editing and assistance with Mandarin wordlist
- Wang Ya Hsuan: many helpful discussions about Chinese grammar
- Iwamoto S.: help with the musical pronunciation scheme
- Geoff: editing and maintenance of German wordlist, creation of Finnish, Russian and Arabic wordlists; phonetic names rendering and text2speech
- Spada Pianezzola, Davide: editing of Spanish & French wordlists
- Foundalis, Harry E.: creation and maintenance of Greek wordlist
- Zuckermann, Ghil`ad: linguistic suggestions
- Totola, Cristian: advice for website creation
- Gelio, Giovanni: glyphs creation
- the Unilang community : wordlists and linguistic knowledge
- Gompel, Maarten van: UniLang-MediaGlyphs exchanges, php programming, MG-Unilang vocabulary editing system
- Borza, Paul Valentin & Oprea, Radu: MediaGlyphs input software programming
- Vipond, James: glyphs creation
Programs:
The following programs are currently used to create new glyphs:
- Vectorial 2D graphics: Corel Draw & Inkscape
- 3D objects: POV-Ray
- 3D poses and animations: Poser & DAZ|Studio
- 3D sceneries: Bryce
- GIF animation conversions: Microsoft GIF animator
Perl, Php, Linux & Vim are used extensively.
Lame, a free and open-source mp3 encoder is used to compress all music samples, which were originally created with the program Reason and then recreated with the perl module MIDI::Simple.

Iconv for character set conversions
Yudit and BabelPad: two excellent free unicode text editors.
Fonts:
The following fonts have been used in glyph creation
- Latin font: Arial
- Free Devanagari font: Kiran
- Kaiti chinese font: Arphic
- Katakana: Bitstream cyberbit
- Music symbols
Translations:
Translations for the glyphs have been either manually inserted by our language curators or adapted from the following electronic wordlists:
- Hanzi-500 (list of most frequent chinese characters)
- CEDICT (Chinese-English wordlist)
- Universal Language Dictionary (by Richard K. Harrison)
- Bulgarian Rechnik
- EDICT (Japanese-English wordlist)
- Unilang Basicwords
- Arabic wordlist from Arabeyes.
- geonames.de "The countries of the world in their own languages" (by Werner Fröhlich)
Many English definitions taken from the lexical database WordNet.
Text-To-Speech:
TTS for phonetic names achieved thanks to mbrola and using the freely available txt2pho programs or coding new ad hoc ones.
For Mandarin Chinese, the MSRCN tts has been used.
Glyphs:
Some glyphs were temporarily borrowed from internet, in particular:
- Internet picture dictionary
- Universal pictorial language (Copyright Wally Flint)
- Clip Art Connection
- Learning and Teaching Scotland
- Open Clip Art Library
- Clipart ETC (c) University of South Florida
- Free Digital Photos
- National Space Science Data Center, NASA
- NOAO/AURA
- Free ClipArt
or made using TrueType dingbat-like fonts (e.g. Animals, Signs....)

These will all eventually be recreated and are just temporarily used.
Copyright, License and Terms of use:
- Disclaimer
  All resources provided by this website come without warranties of any kind.
  Although all the contributors to the project are doing their best to ensure their quality and correctness, this will at no time be guaranteed.
  MediaGlyphs Project and its members can not be held responsible for any inaccurate information or for your use of these resources.
- Glyphs, Linguistic databases, Texts and Webpages
  The material created for the MediaGlyphs project is copyright of MediaGlyphs Project (MediaGlyphs.org) and is provided as a royalty-free resource for any private or educational use.
  By downloading the content of this website (images, texts, databases) you are agreeing to be bound by the terms of this license:
  You may freely copy, distribute and display this content, and make derivative works based on it,
  under the following conditions:
  1. MediaGlyphs Project must be credited as the source of the original content.
  2. You may not sell or permit third parties to sell or license this content. You may not use it for any commercial purpose.
  3. If you alter, transform, or build upon this content, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.
  4. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.
  5. Any of these conditions can be waived if you get written permission from MediaGlyphs Project.
- Programs, Software
  All the programs produced as part of the MediaGlyphs Project are free software; you can redistribute them and/or modify them under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
  The programs are distributed in the hope that they will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License [http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html] for more details.

This page uses Unicode (UTF8)
Last modified: Thu Jun 25 00:44:33 CEST 2009 First appearance: Fri Mar 8 03:33:33 GMT 2002