The GlyphStudy Open-Source Projects Group announces its grand opening

http://gosp.sourceforge.net

The GOSP announced its formal opening today. Here is the press release:

The GlyphStudy Open-Source Projects (GOSP) Group is an association of software developers, Ancient Egyptian educators, students, and scholars of various levels devoted to open source and public domain tools and resources to aid in Egyptology.

The flagship products of the GOSP are a series of Ancient Egyptian dictionaries containing over 12,000 entries from such sources as Faulkner's Middle Egyptian Dictionary. The software to generate the dictionaries and various supporting libraries have also been made available. The flexibility of the software promotes rapid generation of a variety of language resources including dictionaries, sign lists, and cross-references in any imaginable layout, structure, and output format. For instance, work is underway to produce a version of the dictionary for the iPod!

The GOSP is also home to a number of other projects including efforts to produce high quality sign lists, a scholarly and fully referenced dictionary of Ancient Egyptian, and numerous collaborations including improvements being made to the open-source hieroglyphic text editor JSesh, and the wiki-based Egyptian dictionary Eglyptionary.

Director and cofounder Ted Young explains, "This is a very exciting and fast moving project. Since the decision to go forward with this project seven days ago we now have a vast array of resources that we can use to support existing projects and to create new resources to fulfill existing needs. We also have a fantastic website full of information.

"It all started when I announced to the GlyphStudy Yahoo group, dedicated to teaching Middle Egyptian, that I had designed a flexible piece of software that can generate arbitrary dictionaries from various sources such as Mark Vygus’s wordlist. Mark's wordlist is phenomenal. He transcribed over 12,000 entries from Faulkner's dictionary. He continues to maintain this valuable resource and I wanted a solution that would create new dictionaries as he made improvements.

“The response was phenomenal! Dozens of people came forward with suggestions, incredible new ideas, and offers of help. It was decided then that we needed to formalize our movement. Hence, the GOSP was born. There is a wealth of Egyptology resources available to us now. For instance, we are able to produce high quality documents with the use of JSesh, which can export hieroglyphic text as SVG. As a Java library it is suitable for embedding in other applications such as ours. Another goal of the GOSP is to catalog these resources so they are readily available to other Egyptologists.”

For more information please visit the GOSP website:
http://gosp.sourceforge.net

The GOSP Mailing List and Yahoo Group:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/gosp_list/