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Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they're yours. |
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| --Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah | ||
If, as a society, our goal is to possess a working, widely available computing infrastructure in local languages, we are clearly a long way off from our target.
Work clearly needs to be done on many fronts:
First, we need computing devices that have much lower power requirements than those available today. We also need to be looking at innovative power sources: personal computing devices that can operate off human power are an example.
Computing devices like cellular phones have low power requirements and are already today fairly ubiquitous (even in rural India). Similarly, the typical ``digital organizer'' offers extremely low-power operation while packing the power of a personal computer of the 1980s. These devices could be transformed into a reasonable personal computing device for the Indian language market, if they could be made usable and open--for example by adding a touch screen and handwriting recognition software and by building these devices conforming to a published architectural specification.
Stand-alone computers (say for village information centers) would need to be designed so that they can work off a 25W solar panel. It is not clear today what kind of device would fit this bill. It is also not clear whether printing needs can be accommodated in this power budget.
We need better input methods for Indian scripts. Keyboards and keyboard based input methods are awkward for Indian languages. Handwriting recognition seems to hold promise but needs a lot of work.
We need to bootstrap our developer community. The need of the hour is for solid technical information about Indian languages and scripts--information that would be of use to developers. We also need forums where technical issues about Indian language computing can be discussed.
We need to get the kinks out of the standards that cover Indian languages and scripts. The proliferation of language and region specific ``standards'' is harmful and needs to be avoided.
The Indic-Computing project is an open-source project attempting to address some of these issues.
We are developing and giving away under a liberal license infrastructural code that would be of use to developers implementing Indian language software. Examples of this would be libraries that handle transliteration and Indian script display. Lots of other software remains to be written: for example, the pressing need of the hour is for system software that can do handwriting recognition for Indian scripts. Our currently active software development sub-projects are listed under the ``projects'' section of our web site.
Next, we are attempting to address the issue of developer education by creating a freely distributable Handbook. The Handbook is a developer's handbook, covering the issues faced by a software developer attempting to create Indian language processing software. The Handbook also contains tutorials and other introductions to some of the core technologies in use in the field.
Along with the Handbook, we have offer a Technology Map, a handy guide for implementors wishing to reuse existing Indian language software when building larger systems. The Technology Map reviews existing software packages and ``recipes'' for building solutions around them.
Coming to interoperability and standards, our Handbook documents the quirks and pitfalls when implementing standards-compliant Indian language software. We also offer discussion forums (hosted on SourceForge) where developers can discuss and evolve Indian language standards.
For Indian academic institutions, we offer student projects and assistance to teachers in teaching Indian language computing. Some of our volunteers teach classes in institutes in their towns.
There isn't much we are doing about hardware design, (though we would love to do something here) primarily because we don't have hardware development expertise in our volunteer community. We are however, attempting to write our core libraries in a way that doesn't preclude them being used on low-memory, low-powered devices.
Finally, every single line of code or documentation that we write is open-source, including our project infrastructure. We hope that other linguistic groups in the world wanting to bootstrap their computing infrastructure will be able to save time and effort by reusing our setup.
This, and other project documentation, can be downloaded from [ http://indic-computing.sourceforge.net/documentation.html ].
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Copyright © 2001--2007 The Indic-Computing Project. Contact: jkoshy |
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