[smc-discuss] IT Mission Programme in Malayalam language Technology , Today Tomorrow

[Anivar Aravind]

2010/10/28 Dr.B.Ekbal <ekbalb at gmail.com>:
> I have seen the news in papers earlier that such a meeting is to be held and
> hoped to participate as an observer since I am not an expert in this field
> but would like understand the developments and possibilities.  But did not
> get any more information from anybody. As we discussed earlier we can
> consider organising such a programme by our own initiative.


Such a project that plans malayalam computing  for next 5 years must
include  atleast following groups

>From Government & quasi Govt  :  Itmission, Bhasha Institute, sarva
vijnana kosham , CDIT, CDAC , NIC,
>From Academics:  Dr Javahar & team fromCVIT.  IIIT Hyderabad,
Malayalam Departments of Universities , Indic Computing research team
in Thanjaore Tamil University, Various Experts , outside Universities
>From Industry:  Redhat, Microsoft, Google, Openoffice/Libreoffice ,
Local industries working with malayalam computing such as OSSICS,
ZYXWARE, Kriate,
>From FOSS Community: Swathanthra Malayalam computing , Malayalam Wiki
Projects , DAKF,  SPACE
>From Civil society:  Various Individuals  who expressed interest in
malayalam computing, Groups like Malayala Aikyavedi etc

And it must discuss agendas as follows ( This was part of the note we
sent to CM's office )

Assessment of current state and preparing a report on that.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Academicians and technicians in the field of Malayalam language should
sit together  and assess the current state of Malayalam and Computing
aspects. This should include the following.
	1.  The 1969 script reformation, its reasons, impacts, good-bad
effects on Malayalam. How much it was accepted by society? If not
accepted what was the reasons?
	2.  The role of Malayalam media in the writing style of Malayalam in
the past decades
	3.  Assessment of current ambiguity in Malayalam. Should we consider
it as "natural"? Or should there be a force that affects its so called
"natural" growth? If so in general in what way?
	4.  What should be the role of government, academicians, media,
linguists , computational linguists in the growth of Malayalam?
	
Digital Malayalam, its current state
---------------------------------------------
A report on the current state of digital Malayalam by discussing the following:
	1.  Who are the players in this field? Who are the stake holders? And
what are their activities?
	2. Current capabilities of Digital Malayalam - existing applications.
	3. Assessment of current issues in Digital Malayalam. With details.
Cause, Current state, Possible solutions.
	4. Should there be a standard on digital Malayalam? If so what should
be its scope? Who should decide the standard? What is the feasibility
of that when standards are no longer a government only activity.
	5. Does the international standardization organizations such as
Unicode, ISO are enough for Malayalam? Do we have enough voice and
representation there? Does their process allows participation?

Malayalam Computing -  What we need? What we have? Who? How?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1.  Data Encoding-Legacy encoding, unicode, converters.
2. Unicode - encoding, dual encoding. issues, standards.
3. Fonts - existing fonts, font developers/designers, license,
Typewriter script and Traditional scripts. Licenses.
4. Input  methods - existing input methods,
developers/designers/maintainers, Issues, Standards? Encoding issues.
5. Collation
6. Rendering
7. Spellcheckers, autocorrecting applications
8. Dictionaries
9. Corpus, Stemming, Lematizers, Syntax analyzers
10. Research and Development in Language Computing/Processing


This Programme seems to be a hurried response without involving most
of the stakeholders
So lets plan another programme or shift this programme if possible to
include participation from all groups

Anivar