Back at the end of the last century, I decided that everyone liked using icons and symbols, but people had no idea what they meant. Just what does 
mean on a clothes tag?
So I registered icondictionary.{com,org} and set to work.
And failed 😀
But it was a good idea.
It was going to be crowd-sourced from around the world. A Spaniard travelling to Norway would be able to find out what Norwegian-specific road signs (such as the brilliant “Merging by the zipper method“) means, in their own language; be it Castilian, Catalan or something else I don’t know about.
And perhaps, surprisingly, it would be of great help to people with visual impairment.
Because the user would be able to get descriptions too (the modern alt is rarely enough, as you need proper description in detail) – it must be so frustrating to be reading a book and told that “his nose looked like some road sign”, when you have never seen one clearly, or ever had it described to you.
In fact, what does a poison icon look like on a bottle? Sort of important to know and detect.
So I planned to be able to capture images and look them up. This was before smart phones, so cameras were a problem, but they were coming along, and once the data was there, it would all work. I already had a C-Pen that could scan lines of text, so it couldn’t be long. And then anyone could scan a bottle and find out if that obscure symbol that someone thought was obvious was in fact saying the contents would kill them.
There was even a bit of business proposition here. The site would have decent quality images on display, but also behind, wherever possible there would be SVG versions that could be purchased, if a designer wanted high quality. With payment going back to the crowd-person who created it. Oh, and I had moderators/editors taking responsibility for areas, such as flags or laundry symbols, and also languages. With all the database permissions that entailed.
I had a student (Peter Dibdin) build a java app that enabled me to hand craft SVG documents to their highest quality or even a perfect description, and keep them in collections. It would then allow export in jpg at different resolutions, for different purposes. It still works nicely, by the way.
Given that SVG was only submitted to W3C in 1998, and you needed an Adobe plugin to view in a browser, you may get a sense of how ambitious this all was!
Even language stuff was new. I wanted to do all the stuff to distinguish pt-br and pt-pt etc., but even RFC 1766, trying to standardise it all, had only came out in 1995.
Clearly all this was hugely ambitious. Although the biggest problem was of course that I didn’t really have the skills 😀. And when I tried moving from a database to an RDF store, as the Semantic Web developed, since what I really wanted to do was at a semantic level, that was clearly going to be the final nail in the coffin!
Also, Google had recently come along, and was developing now, so search seemed to be much easier, and surely these huge corporations could do it – it was only a matter of time.
Then, of course, Wikipedia came along, and it looked like that would make it all redundant – it was only a matter of time.
But NO, it hasn’t happened yet.
Google Lens tells me that the Norwegian zipper sign is “A Norwegian Road Sign” – woohoo! Yeah, I sort of knew that because it is on the side of the Norwegian road I am driving down.
LLMs & ChatGPT? – it's only a matter of time!
We see more and more icons and symbols that are meant to be language-independent and obvious, and they just aren’t. I still can’t point my camera at one and find out what it means. Even though my car shows me what speed limit sign I last passed!
I didn’t finally (almost) give up until a couple of years ago. It would all be so much easier now. But I have other things I am doing that are being successful, and starting over in my 70s is probably not the best thing. But I only let the domains go in 2022, though 😀. Possibly mainly because I can always find another one, in this modern world of not needing com or org 😉.
