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| 1964- 1974 |
Ten years of computer and language research by the vision holder starting at the University of Oregon (1964) through a NUL Chevron Fellowship (1966) a NUL IBM Fellowship (1968) a Canadian Federal grant (1971) and an Ontario provincial grant (1974). |
| 1975 | Designation of the Universal Language Institute site as being Bahji du Canada. |
| 1978 | Formation of UNCOMMAN Association by 1978 Wintario grant. |
| 1984 | UNCOMMAN incorporates federally as UNKOMMON Foundation, a non-profit organization. |
| 1985 | Start of design of the building for the Universal Language Institute at Bahji du Canada. |
| 1988 | The Universal Language Institute design wins first place award for Canadian Architecture. |
| 1989 | The ACCESS Project begun by the ACCESS Colloquium which consisted of the President of The American Literacy Council, The Director of University Systems for Sperry Rand Corporation, The Director of the Modern Languages Department at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, The President of the Canadian National Captioning Centre for the deaf, and a number of university professors. |
| 1990 | The Canadian Federal Government gave the ACCESS Colloquium an initial grant. In order to cash the grant check the Colloquium had to incorporate and today operates under the style of ACCESS Colloquium Incorporated. |
| 1991 | Through the government grant and generous community support amounting to several hundred thousand dollars the ACCESS Project shot thirty hours of Betacam SP video tape. |
| 1992 | The ACCESS Project developed the first software for translating scripts into the FXNeTiK spelling used for captioning in the ACCESS System and analyzed and evaluated video editing equipment. The project was delayed by waiting for manufacturers to develop a promised Nonlinear Online Video Editing Lab (NOVEL) technology that was necessary for the completion of the project. |
| 1993 | The ACCESS Project obtained use of the first AVID Media Suite Pro sixty-field/thirty- frame per second NOVEL system installed in Canada. This system was installed at the Canadian National Captioning Centre for the deaf, for the purpose of working on the ACCESS Project, and this is where the work continued until May 1995. 1993 also saw the development of the World Language Program concept by the UNKOMMON Foundation and preparation for its decision to use the ACCESS system for this program. |
| 1994 | The World Language Program was accepted as a project by the IAEWP (International Association of Educators for World Peace). The IAEWP has been an NGO of the United Nations since 1973 and of UNESCO since 1975. |
| Proposals were sent to twenty-seven provincial governors in Thailand. Each of these governors received a presentation on the World Language Program, under the aegis of the Royal Consulate of Thailand in Canada, while they were in Canada. By the end of 1994 eighteen teaching positions were available in Thailand for WLP teacher volunteers. |
| In December the first hour of the ACCESS videos, consisting of six lessons, along with a drill tape, was completed and delivered to the University of Kansas for evaluation. Also in December a letter was sent to each of the national chancellors in the ninety-one member countries of the IAEWP, inviting them to participate as chancellor for the World Language Program and by December 31st sixteen countries had World Language Program chancellors appointed. |
| 1995 | The editing equipment was moved to a video school location and the World Language Program had assigned to it, by the Toronto Municipal Job Incentives Program, for six months, four full time editors. There was a considerable learning curve in learning to use the editing system, in the training of a half dozen editors, and in the development of the icons, formats and standards to be used in the videos. |
| By the end of the year, six hours of video had been edited and the project had trained over 60 people in non-linear editing, nine of which proved capable of actually doing the project. At this time the project lost access to the original editing equipment but the video digitizing boards for another system were donated to the WLP by the AVID Corporation. |
| 1996 | There were over sixty volunteers for the overseas teaching program and a total of over 100 program volunteers. There were World Language Program Chancellors in 28 countries and over 100 teacher positions available in four countries.It had been demonstrated that both teacher volunteers and teaching positions were readily available. |
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a. |
A 40,000 word simplified dictionary had been scanned in preparation for editing. | |
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b. |
Item selection had been made for a 4800 word picture dictionary. | |
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c. |
The first five of ten teacher correspondence lessons had been written. | |
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d. |
The first four of twenty student workbooks have been written. | |
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e. |
A layout mockup has been completed for the student workbooks. | |
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f. |
Arrangement had been made with Project Gutenberg to use its machine readable texts and to store the ACCESS dictionary on their system. |
| 1997 |
The World Language Program went on the World Wide Web.
Because of the Web, The World Language Program, for the first time, achieved a level of over 500 volunteers. With Sally Ward doing most of the data entry, over 80 editors were able to create sentences for the 40,000 definitons in the dictionary and the dictionary data base was implemented. Roz Rus edited the 44,000 words on the Angel spelling list. David Hatch developed and installed the first web on-line Angel Translation program for the web. In September of 1997, Shawn Beilfuss has taken over guidance of the Comic Book Project. |
| 1998 | - In the early part of the year,
Alex Nauda directed us to the Carnegie Mellon Institute word list,
and by mid year there was completed the major effort of merging it with the Rondthaler/Lias list and converting them both to Angel FXNeTiK spelling.
By August of 1998 the World Language Program had chancellors in over 30 countries and Sally Ward became the Chancellor Administrator and editor of the Chancellor News letter. In December the editors completed syllabifying 815 merged word list files of fifty words each. |
| 1999 | By March of 1999 a number of translators, the world over, helped in translating the 18 languages that appear on the Web Pal pages at: Brett Holt wrote an improved Windows 95 program for on-line ANJeL Tun translation which is able to translate to both Angel and NES (New English Spelling). The latter is under the guidance of Ron Footer in London England and is used by the ACCESS project as Bridge English. There were developed a suite of free analyses programs for researchers wishing to do research on the Angel and NES fonetic spelling lists. We created our Antony Alexander and Dr. Steve Bett, along with Roslyn Rus, Douglas Worthingham, and some others started reviewing Regularization for the ACCESS System.
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| 2000 | Almost the whole of the year 2000 was spent in a gigantic project of supplementing our definition data base with three more dictionaries, one of them being the unabridged Webster's International Dictionary. All three were digitized and checked for order and spelling. A significant effort was made to become an independent NGO member of the United Nations. Our president submitted by the stated deadline the required application on our letterhead, but no response was obtained. We also made a study into using Arabic Characterization for the ANJeL Tun. In the fall of the year the Bahji Memorial was extensively landscape. The placing of the natural red stone was accompanied by a Metis Ceremony conducted by the National Chairman of the Southern Metis.
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| 2001 |
A follow up phone call regarding our United Nations application determined that it had been received but that because of limited resources due to lack of funding they had not been able to process all the applications. The year 2001 saw a major effort to reorganize our web pages and move them to a new server. The major task in 2001, was to merge all the dictionary data bases into one and to rationalize them with the word lists.
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| 2002 |
In 2002 at the future site of the Universal Language Institute we had the first annual World Language Program picnic with a tree planting activity to plant 88 new trees. There was attendance from 3 States in the US and 2 Provinces in Canada. We once again did a major reorganization on the web pages and moved them to a still faster server. The major task in 2002, continued to be to merge all the dictionary data bases into one and to rationalize them with the word lists. Two volunteer programmers have worked on the project for part of the year and at the time of this writing another volunteer is due to arrive at the end of the week to begin work on it full time. Upon completion of the above task we would like to reactivate the on-line translation programs. We added a Chancellor for Japan and have made a major arrangement for the placing of volunteers into China. This latter we still have to incorporate into the web pages. Video editing technology has made a considerable advance in the last year. Reasonably priced non-linear editing programs with much greater capability have become much more available and new video cameras with direct DVD storage capabilities appear to be on the verge of integration with them. This year we have also begun the study of animation capabilities.
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