[Indlinux-group] Announcing Project Silpa

[Santhosh Thottingal]

[Copying from :
http://thottingal.in/blog/2009/06/16/announcing-project-silpa/ ]


Many of my friends already know about a project I am working on,  this
is a public announcement of that.

The project is named as Silpa, may be an acronym of Swathanthra(Mukth,
Free as in Freedom) Indian Language Processing Applications. It is a
web framework and a set of applications for processing Indian
Languages in many ways. Or in other words, it is a platform for
porting existing and upcoming language processing applications to the
web.

Before going to the details, you can have a quick preview of the
application here : http://smc.org.in/silpa

The project is designed for adding applications/utilities as plugins.
The framework is written from scratch using python language. As you
can see in the development version, there are number of modules
already written.  Most of the modules requires some more work to make
it _complete_. The application is free software and there is a link to
the source code at the bottom of the application.

As it is meant for covering all languages of India, all modules should
be capable of handling all scripts from India(Sometimes English too).
At the same time , the language of input data is transparent ,
meaning, user need not mention that _this_ is the language in which
she is entering the data. Unlike desktop applications which asks to
specify the language along with the input data(for eg: Spell checker)
, the modules should try to detect the language them self. And if
possible, modules try to process the data even if the input data is in
multiple Indic scripts.

The modules may be General purpose(eg: Dictionay, Spellcheck,Sort.
Transliteration, Font conversion..) or Technology/Algorithm
Demonstration purpose (eg: Hyphenation, Stemmer, Search algorithms)

Some of the modules are usable  as of now, while some of them are in
development. You may just try out them. User’s data will not be logged
 except when a crash occurs(at that time user data and exception trace
will be logged for later debugging).

And, this is also a call for contributors. You may propose new ideas
for modules, feature suggestion etc.. A few  students showed interest
in the project. Unfortunately python is not a language in their
college syllabus. So if you are good in python and have interest in
contributing to the project, drop me a mail :) . There is no separate
version for development and the one which is present at
http://smc.org.in/silpa . All development happens there itself and any
change in the code is immediately available for use!(or immediately
starts crashing for user data)

I will write on some interesting algorithms I used for some modules
later. If you are curious to know them, read the code!


Thanks
Santhosh

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