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From: Joseph K. <jk...@us...> - 2003-01-10 08:48:54
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January 2002 -- December 2002
Status of the Indic-Computing Project
31 December 2002
-- Joseph Koshy <jkoshy(@)users.sourceforge.net>
Executive Summary
The project's progress in the past year has been mixed. While most of our
software sub-projects are still in the planning and early execution
stages, the response of the indian-language computing community to the
first Indic-Computing workshop has been extremely heartening. We present
the status of the Indic-Computing project and present some of the next
steps planned.
Retrospective
The lessons from the past year seem to be:
* There was a pent-up need for a cross-platform and cross-language forum
where issues related to indian language computing could be discussed.
The community's enthusiastic response to the first Indic-Computing
workshop and its subsequent participation on our mailing lists showed
that a number of research groups, NGOs, open-source groups and
individual developers do not have adequate representation in the
``official'' fora in India today. Another point that emerged was that
there was no space earlier for people to discuss software development.
We are really pleased that we have been able to provide this
much-needed space to our community.
* Attracting quality, committed volunteers has been a challenge.
Finding good talent and winning people over to a cause is a challenge
for most volunteer efforts. However, open-source Indian language
projects seem to have the following additional characteristics
compared to projects being executed in the developed world:
* Most of the work is being done by fresh developers; working
groups with seasoned developers are few and far between. This
fits into India's contemporary software industry culture of
senior professionals almost exclusively concentrating on
management roles.
Perhaps as a consequence, the quality of software engineering
displayed by most of the existing groups is such that reuse of
the code by others is difficult. For example, most groups do not
have source control methodologies underpinning their work, and
their work is not generally open to peer-review while under
development.
* The vast majority of indian language open-source efforts seem
focused on one Indian language. Efforts towards solving common
issues and developing a reusable framework for indian language
computing are rare to find.
* The few companies that have some stake in the Indian language
market do not seem keen on contributing technology to the
open-source movement.
* Finding authentic linguistic information for the Handbook has been a
challenge.
We hope to address some of these concerns in the coming year by the
following means:
* The Handbook will have tutorial sections on the basics of technologies
relevant to indian-language computing: on character encodings, fonts,
programming with locales, and the architecture of the X Window System,
in addition to the originally planned linguistic information for
developers. We hope this will help our developers produce higher
quality, architecturally correct code.
* A Technology Map is being planned to serve as a guide to implementors
wanting to choose from the large number of open-source indian language
projects.
* We will seek out quality developer talent more aggressively, both by
attracting talent and by improving our persuasion skills and
convincing companies to donate quality developer time.
A frequently requested item has been a project road map and task list
chunked down to the level which matches the time available to
potential volunteers. This is being worked on.
* Wherever possible, we will focus our software development efforts
towards building infrastructure and infrastructure related tools.
Events
* The first Indic-Computing workshop was held at Bangalore during
the 15th and 16th of September, 2002. Forty two people participated
(we had to turn away a few because of space constraints) and the
response was overwhelmingly positive. The workshop proceedings are
available for public download via SourceForge's file distribution
service.
Kudos and a big thank you to our volunteers and organizers: Ashish
Kotamkar, Brij Sethi, Suzanne Adela Byford, Tapan Parikh, Venky
Hariharan, Vijay Pratap Singh Aditya (in alphabetical order by first
name).
This event was co-sponsored by Hewlett-Packard India Software
Operation, Dr. Patrick Hall of the SCALLA project, Microsoft India,
and Ekgaon Technologies Pvt. Ltd. A very big ``thank you'' to all of
you!
One of the outcomes of the workshop was a decision to create a formal
consortium to represent the needs of the community. Planning for this
is underway: please contact <vijay(@)ekgaon.com> for more information.
* The Indic-Computing project was represented at the LRC 2002
eContent Localization conference by Tapan Parikh and Venky Hariharan.
Their trip was partially funded by Dr. Patrick Hall of the SCALLA
project. Thank you, Dr. Hall and SCALLA!
Infrastructure
* A new mailing list, indic-computing-users(@)lists.sourceforge.net for
users of indian language software, has been added. We now have five
active mailing lists:
* indic-computing-announce for project announcements,
* indic-computing-cvs-logs for developers tracking changes to our
source tree,
* indic-computing-standards for discussing standards,
* indic-computing-devel for software developers,
* indic-computing-users for users.
Of these, the -users list has seen the most traffic (374 messages)
this year, followed by the -devel list (332 messages) and the
-standards list (164 messages).
* Deeproot Linux Pvt. Ltd. has set up our first mirror in India.
Thank you, Deeproot Linux!
* The project website was reworked to integrate all of the project's
documentation. Our users should hopefully find the new site easier to
use. Our website build infrastructure has been documented and is
available for all to reuse.
* The following pieces of documentation were added to the project:
* A contributors list listing the people and organizations that
have contributed to the project.
* A document on the project's CVS infrastructure.
* A document on the project's SGML based documentation
infrastructure. This document also describes how the website is
composed from its constituent pieces.
* A guide for project volunteers.
* A FAQ.
The Indic-Computing Handbook
While we did manage to locate a number of resources on indian languages,
the task of incorporating the knowledge from these has not progressed very
far. The Handbook has however undergone some degree of expansion and
restructuring based on the feedback from its early reviewers.
* Scripts and Languages are now clearly separated.
* A number of tutorials on the basics of indian language computing are
in progress.
We hope that the coming year (2003) will be a more fruitful one for the
Handbook.
Software Projects
Most of the software development projects planned have remained in the
planning stage.
The current projects in-progress are:
Indic OS (a.k.a the Bootable CD)
Developing infrastructure to enable implementors to build custom
OS images that support indian language ``out of the box''.
Status: requirements specification is done. Design is in progress.
Translation Manager
A cross-platform tool to help documentation translators manage
translations to indian languages lacking character set standards
or having flawed character set definitions.
Status: requirements have been specified. Design is in progress.
This project has graph-theoretical problems at its heart so
getting help from academic institutions would be easy (we hope).
Technology Map
The design and implementation of a survey mechanism for indian
language computing technologies.
Status: requirements specification has been completed. Prototypes
are in progress.
Documentation Tool-chain
Design and implement a documentation processing tool-chain capable
of handling indian scripts lacking the backing of character set
standards.
Status: partially implemented. This tool-chain is in use today for
generating the Indic-Computing Handbook. Print side support (PDF
generation) needs to be strengthened.
The following projects were canceled:
A Portable Input Method Framework for Indian Languages
The volunteer who signed up for this work expressed his inability
to find time for the work.
People and Roles
Tapan S. Parikh <tap2k(@)yahoo.com> has graciously consented to be be a
co-administrator of the project on SourceForge.
About these project status reports
Our project status reports are sent out to the indic-computing-announce
list at periodic intervals. They are also archived under the project's
website, at URL: http://indic-computing.sourceforge.net/status.html.
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From: Ashish K. <as...@mi...> - 2002-09-02 10:54:17
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Dear Friends, The Indic Computing Group is organising a two day workshop in Bangalore on September 15-16, 2002. The main purpose of this workshop is to build a community of people working in the space of developing local language development tools, applications, and content, to better coordinate their ideas and approaches towards the future of indic-computing. By building a community of practitioners, developers, linguistic experts and organizers, we hope to share ideas and experiences, facilitate broad discussion about the issues involved and discuss future directions for the field. We also hope that this broad coalition would enable more broad-based and active participation in international standards processes and forums, such as the Unicode Consortium and W3C. At the end of the meeting, we hope to have assembled a community of technically informed and motivated people to organize and lead the indic-computing development effort into the future. The leadership of this community should be individual driven, technically motivated, and entrenched with youth, vitality and a progressive vision. We hope that you will join us and contribute to taking this effort forward. A draft agenda is enclosed with this mail for your perusal. Details about the schedule, venue etc. would be conveyed to the participants soon. Please get in touch with me or any of the following people if you are interested to participate and contribute to this workshop . Tapan Parikh - ta...@ya... Venky Hariharan - ve...@vs... Joseph Koshy - jk...@fr... Warm regards, Ashish Kotamkar (as...@mi...) ------------------------------------------------------------ DRAFT AGENDA DAY 1 1) Experiences of Practitioners - Discuss people's experiences with using local language technologies, particularly highlighting gaps in the technology and the particular reasons certain technology decisions were made. Include NGOs, development organizations, schools, government offices, etc. 2) Encodings - Discuss various encoding options, their strengths and weaknesses, and OS and application-level support for local language computing in each. Also discuss the process by which each standard evolves. 3) Display Technologies - Discuss various font technologies, their relative merits, and also OS and application-level support for their display and rendering. 4) Input Methods- Discuss various types of input methods, their advantages, prospective users, and software / driver support. DAY 2 5) Linguistics - Presentation by groups studying language representation from a linguistic perspective. Discuss the linguistic issues and problems with current encoding systems, fonts and rendering methodologies, and ways these problems can and have been redressed, either by participation in standards amendment procedures, or via other avenues. 6) Tools - Discuss various local language toolkits and APIs, the functionality they provide, and the appropriate ways for those technologies to be included in the future from an application and OS perspective. 7) Organization and Capacity Building - Discuss various ways people have tried to organize this process before, and how we can all work together to consolidate these efforts to build a common platform for discussion and policy. 8) Future Directions - Discuss future research directions for indic-language computing, including speech generation and recognition, machine translation, multi-lingual data retrieval, and other promising research avenues. -x- |
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From: J. K. <jk...@us...> - 2002-01-23 09:20:24
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Status of the Indic-Computing Project
20 Jan 2002
[Infrastructure]
* We got our website up at http://indic-computing.sourceforge.net/
Two mailing lists were created for carrying discussions:
* "ind...@li..." is an unmoderated
list for developers discussing indian language software tools.
* "ind...@li..." is an
unmoderated list for people discussing and evolving indian
language computing standards.
Two other special-purpose mailing lists were also created:
* "ind...@li..." is a moderated,
low-volume list for project related announcements.
* "ind...@li..." is a public list
that contains summaries of changes to the project sources.
We are using the excellent infrastructure for collaborative
development hosted by SourceForge.Net. Thank you, SourceForge!
* Web-site infrastructure in partially ready.
The website is today described using a rather ad-hoc mixture of SGML
content in various forms. The website is built and installed using
`make', a standard program development tool available in the unix
environment.
I am looking at organizing the website better, both in terms of
content and build infrastructure. Suggestions are welcomed.
* The Handbook skeleton is now in place. The Handbook is written in
DocBook/SGML. These SGML sources are transformed into HTML, PDF,
and RTF formats by the build toolchain. This infrastructure has
been adapted from that used by the FreeBSD Documentation Project.
* CVS infrastructure (version control) for the project is being put in
place.
The documentation (Handbook, FAQ, the project website, etc.) and
project sources for whatever tools we develop, will be placed under
CVS, and made publically accessible using SourceForge.Net standard
facilities.
[Languages]
* Dr. U. B. Pavanaja of the Kannada Ganaka Parishat (KGP) was kind
enough to hand over a CD containing KGP's latest standards in .doc
(MS-Word) and PDF format. The CD also contained Microsoft
Windows(r) executables for a standards-compliant word-processor and
Kannada tutor.
* Neeru Sethi located and procured for the project, information on the
Gurmukhi script, some typewriter keyboard layouts and a sample of
popular Gurmukhi fonts for our analysis.
* Abraham Mathen has volunteered to compile information on Malayalam
for the Handbook.
[Projects]
* We've received offers of help from many quarters. Thanks to all who
have responded.
* P. S. Vinod has taken up the task of helping design and implement a
portable framework for indian language input. This work ties into
one of our roadmap items: providing support for web-based indian
language input.
[Next Steps]
* Project website to be worked on further. We need a "How to
Contribute" article, listing the expectations from volunteers!
Other infrastructure work to be completed.
* The Handbook needs editors for language specific chapters. A call
for Editors will be sent out, specifying the expected work loads and
responsibilities.
* Kannada and Gurmukhi information recieved has to be brought into the
Handbook.
* Continue on the tools and activities listed in the project roadmap.
[About these project status reports]
These project status reports are sent out approximately once a month,
their exact frequency being something of a mystery to everyone.
They are also archived under the project's website, under:
http://indic-computing.sourceforge.net/status-reports/
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