About

Summary

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Introduction

Kanji-Galaxy.com is an independent and private website specialized in Japanese characters. Everything started in 2005 with a simple collection of Japanese Kanji characters. Over time, this collection grew in size and complexity and became the Kanji Database (KanDa).

While working hard on the Kanji Database project, new requirements emerged which lead to additional sub-projects. The first one was Glyph-Master FX, a glyph design and browser application, followed by a web-based search engine and front-end for the Kanji Database. Recently, with the personal need to learn Japanese, a new flashcard program called Moji Brain is currently in the early stages of development.

Goals

The main goal of Kanji-Galaxy.com is to become the primary source for everything related to Japanese characters. This goal will not purely be achieved by obtaining huge amounts of data, but by also critically reviewing available information while ensuring information quality and correctness at the same time. This demand in high quality information will be achieved by following a radical new approach in collecting, correcting, comparing, and correlating information (4C method), supported by modern information technology methods and tools.

Another important aspect of Kanji-Galaxy.com is to become a friendly and collaborative place someday, where people interested in Japanese characters can participate, share and discuss.

Motivation

Being fascinated by Japan, it's diverse culture and beautiful language for a long time, I began to become interested in its unique and complex writing system supporting different kinds of characters.

After having consulted countless books and other sources of information, the following major issues were identified:

  1. All available references regarding Japanese characters are either very specialized or limited. Most of them cover only a fraction of all available characters, while other focus only on certain aspects like readings, variation forms et cetera. At the moment, a global and overall single source of information is clearly missing.
  2. Even today, the majority of Japanese characters is digitally unavailable, due missing support by character sets and fonts. Without unique code points and available fonts, impractical and limited workarounds like image representations are currently to only way to use these unsupported Japanese characters.
  3. Although many good resources about Japanese characters exist, the quality and information correctness of some of the so called "top" references and international standards is not satisfying. Some even contain obvious errors, which can not be acceptable.
  4. Indifference and the lack of will to correct clear mistakes and illogical inconsistencies, which have been accumulated over time, like for example the stroke order of the Kanji characters 左 and 右.

 

So, there is a definitely a need to address the above mentioned problems and come up with a solution. Another motivating aspect is the fact that although Kanji-Galaxy.com is a spare-time project with very limited resources, it has come already so far to be able to compete with today's best sources if not even top them.

Team
Currently, the following people are part of Kanji-Galaxy.com:
Jörn Ishikawa
Project Lead, Development Lead, Data Specialist, Quality Assurance, Documentation, Research, Marketing, Source Procurement
Yukiko Ishikawa
Data Specialist, Quality Assurance, Research

History

2014-08-16 2014-02-05 2013-03-10
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