[Indic-computing-devel] Re: [Indlinux-gujarati] My introduction and Debian-IN

[Vijay P. S. A. <vi...@ek...>]

Dear Jaldhar,

Good to hear about your efforts and willingness for working on Indian 
language technology. Allow me to introduce you to the Indic-Computing 
effort. Indic-Computing project at Sourceforge has been active since 
last two years on issues for Indic languages. We called for the first 
workshop on standardisation issues and other problems in September 2002 
at Bangalore from where we decided to develop a concerted effort for 
removing anomalies in indic language technologies and stardardisation. 
You can join the group at http://indic-computing.sourceforge.net.

We are trying to consolidate the group as "Indic-Computing Consortium" a 
representative body which shall allow partnership between developers, 
academic institutions, corporate and government to enable development of 
indic language technologies. We have started building regional groups 
now after holding a workshop on font issues in march 2003 again in 
Bangalore which we had representatives from three countries (India, 
Nepal & Bangladesh). The regional groups would be taking up resource 
building in each language  and form teams of volunteers to take up these 
issues through workshops, meetings, training sessions, conferences etc.

Several language groups such as Malayalam, Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi, 
Marathi have made substantial progress towards consolidation and holding 
of first meeting in near future. Our aim is to have these groups for all 
indic languages. We are trying to build support for the consortium in 
the expat community also, we would be happy to have your and other 
willing people, contribution for development of Indic-computing.

I am sending you some reports in my next mail (to you) on the 
developments till and future plans.

best wishes

vijay

-- 

Vijay Pratap Singh Aditya
ekgaon technologies
email: vi...@ek...
website: http://www.ekgaon.com


Jaldhar H. Vyas wrote:

>Hello everyone,
>
>My name is Jaldhar Vyas.  I am 32 years old and live in Jersey City, New
>Jersey, USA with my wife Jyoti and infant daughter Shailaja.  My family is
>from Gujarat but I was born in UK and have lived there and in the US my
>whole life. I can speak, read, and write Gujarati but owing to a lack of
>formal education my grammar and vocabulary is not always that good which
>is something my wife (who was born in Gujarat) is always teasing me about.
>So I've decided to do something about it.  You can't learn a language well
>without practice and as I spend a lot of time on the computer, I wanted to
>see what could be done using Gujarati there.  I am also one of the
>organizers of the Advaita Vedanta home page and mailing list
>(http://wwww.advaita-vedanta.org) and there we have a need for using
>Sanskrit in our communications.
>
>I have been a Debian GNU/Linux developer since 1997.  I decided to put my
>language and computing interests together and start a subproject within
>Debian called Debian-IN to facilitate the development of Indian language
>support.  Although I'm not one of those people who is against making money
>with software, it is readily apparent that the cause of Indic language
>computing has been hurt by multiple, proprietary solutions and a lack of
>standards.  Thus it is vital that the basic computing infrastructure
>should be free software only.  Debian is dedicated to the principles of
>free software so it will be a good foundation.
>
>I have joined the indlinux-group and indlinux-gujarati lists and look
>forward to being an active participant.
>
>
>  
>