[development] Crossword Puzzle Module for Drupal + Assisted Reading

[Sabine Cretella]

Hi, we are considering to have crossword puzzles for our regional
languages and since there are already some Drupal installations in these
languages and probably there will be an online newspaper passing over to
Drupal in the near future it would be nice to have a Crossword Puzzle
Module. This also means: yes, we are working on the localization of
Drupal in
- Piedmontese: http://pms.i-iter.org/
- Neapolitan: http://nap.i-iter.org/
- Lombard: http://lmo.i-iter.org/

Furthermore a crossword puzzle is also very much an educational product,
for example to learn a foreign language.

Now there are four ways one would normally create crossword puzzles:
*generated out of random expressions (definition + word)
*created  from a specific terminology set (for students for example)
(definition + word)
*translation puzzle (word in one language that must be translated into
another language)
*picture to word puzzle (pictures show what needs to be inserted)

The data for the crossword puzzles should be retreived from
http://omegawiki.org since there you find a multilingual dictionary
under a free license that can indeed handle various kinds of defintions,
so the alternate definitions for crossword puzzles are indeed possible.
What we don't have right now is the connection to pictures, but this
could be solved through an application called instant commons which will
make images available with multilingual tags. These images are actually
stored on http://commons.wikimedia.org.

Besides that I feel that a combination of Drupal with OmegaWiki for
certain usages makes sense: only think about the tags attributed to
articles ... these tags could be handled in such a way that if someone
searches for "dog" on a multilingual Drupal installation he will not
only get all articles where you find the term dog, but also all articles
that contain the German word "Hund" or the Italian "cane". So if
information eventually is not available in one language information in
all other languages can be proposed (many people nowadays speak more
than one language).

Just a note on Assisted Reading: Martin Mai, from the University of
Bamberg, created a script that helps us to tag texts with assisted
reading. For now the linking is done manually by me. Since we would need
this feature as well in Drupal I would just show you what we do now and
how we would like to have it work directly from within Drupal:
This is an article in Neapolitan language that has the feature:
http://www.positanonews.it/menu/default.asp?id=6167&pag=News+%2D+Nutizzie
by clicking on the links a small info with dictionary information will
open. That is something we would like to see in Drupal as well - it will
be needed in universities, schools, in newspapers who want to make their
contents accessibile to more people and I can imagine that some very
specialised installations also could make use of it to give a better
service to their readers.

I won't go too deep in all this right now - my actual question is: is
there already some kind of module for Drupal around that creates
crossword puzzles and therefore could be adapted? If not: which, to your
opinion, is the easiest way to get it on its way?

And: how to deal with the assisted reading bits and pieces?

This e-mail was copied to a group of interested people - as I noted: my 
e-mail gets into your moderator queue if I copy them all - so here are 
their names:
Bèrto 'd Sèra (i-iter.org)
Gerard Meijssen (Open Progress)
Antonio D'Urso (PositanoNews)
Michele Cinque (PositanoNews)
Martin Mai (University of Bamberg, Germany)
Kim Bruning (Programs OmegaWiki.org, Mediawiki, OmegaT and others)
Giuseppe Lucibello (is very new to our group, php and mysql programmer)

Thank you so much for your time and consideration.

Best wishes,

Sabine Cretella
Connectivity and Integration Manager
for Open Progress
s.cretella at openprogress.org
skype: sabinecretella
blog: http://sabinecretella.blogspot.com