[Indic-computing-announce] Status Report #2 (Jan 2002---Dec 2002)
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[Indic-computing-announce] Status Report #2 (Jan 2002---Dec 2002)
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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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