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Status Report: January 2002--December 2002 |
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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.
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.
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, Frederick Noronha, 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!
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:
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:
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.
Most of the software development projects planned have remained in the planning stage.
The current projects in-progress are:
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.
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).
The design and implementation of a survey mechanism for indian language computing technologies.
Status: requirements specification has been completed. Prototypes are in progress.
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:
Tapan S. Parikh <tap2k(@)yahoo.com> has graciously consented to be be a co-administrator of the project on SourceForge.
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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Copyright © 2001--2009 The Indic-Computing Project. Contact: jkoshy |
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