Malayalam Wikisource Offline version
Posted on June 11, 2011
| Santhosh Thottingal
Malayalam Wikisource community today released the first offline version of Malayalam wikisource during the 4th annual wiki meetup of Malayalam wikimedians. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a wikisource project release its offline version. Malayalam wiki community had released the first version of Malayalam wikipedia one year back.
Releasing the offline version of a wikisource is a challenging project. The technical aspects of the project was designed and implemented by myself.
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Mediawiki Berlin hackathon
Posted on May 17, 2011
| Santhosh Thottingal
I am just back from Mediawiki Berlin Hackathon. On May 13 to 15, Mediawiki developers attended the hackathon and squashed many bugs and discussed many features. Members of language committee had its first real-life meeting in parallel with hackathon. It was a nice event, learned a lot, talked to many awesome hackers and linguists.
Milos Rancic has written a summary of the discussions happened during language committee meeting here : http://lists.
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Creating a new Language ecosystem- Sourashtra as example
Posted on May 7, 2011
| Santhosh Thottingal
Sourashtra is a language spoken by Sourashtra people living in South Tamilnadu and Gujarat of India. Originated from Brahmi and then Grandha, this language is mother tongue for half a million people. But most of them are not familiar with the script of this language. Very few people knows reading and writing on Sourashtra script. Sourashtra has a ISO 639-3 language code saz and Unicode range U+A880 – U+A8DF
Recently Sourashtra wikipedia project was started in the wikimedia incubator : http://incubator.
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Cross Language Approximate Search on Indic Languages- A demo
Posted on April 3, 2011
| Santhosh Thottingal
A demo of cross language approximate search in Indic text:
The Malayalam word സാമ്പാര് is compared against a paragraph from http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sambar.
In the bottom half, words marked in yellow color are search results.
You can see that a Kannada word ಸಾಂಬಾರ್ is matched for Malayalam word. And that is why this is called cross-language.
The inflections of the words സാമ്പാര് – സാമ്പാറും, സാമ്പാറു etc are also found as results.
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Tamil Collation in GLIBC
Posted on February 26, 2011
| Santhosh Thottingal
A few months back, we started fixing the collation rules of Indian languages in GNU C library. Pravin Satpute prepared patches for many languages and I prepared patches for Malayalam and Tamil. Later Pravin enhanced the Tamil patch.
You can read the rules used for Malayalam collation here[PDF document]. Tamil patch was applied to upstream, but the bug is still open since there is some confusion on the results.
Before reading the below discussion, please read the discussion happened in the bug report : [ta_IN] Tamil collation rules are not working in other locales
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Identifiers In Indic Languages
Posted on January 8, 2011
| Santhosh Thottingal
Recently, while preparing a critique for IDN Policy for Malayalam language prepared by CDAC, I noticed that ICANN does not allow control characters in the domain names. Sometime back I noticed Python 3 identifiers also does not allow control characters in the Identifiers. This blog post attempts to analyze the issue by looking at the Unicode and ICANN specifications about these special characters.
Apart from the existing characters in Indic languages, Zero width Joiner and Zero width non joiners are widely used in Indic languages to control how the ligatures are formed.
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Dictionary Jabber Buddy Bots
Posted on November 20, 2010
| Santhosh Thottingal
Recently we released two Jabber buddy bots for dictionary lookup. By adding eng.mal.dict@gmail.com as a chat contact one can ask for the meaning of an English word in Malayalam by just sending a chat message. Similarly for English-Hindi or Hindi-English dictionary, we have another bot eng.hin.dict@jabber.org. Both of these dictionaries use Dict databases based on DICT protocol.
Both of these bots were well received by the users. We have 8000+ users for English-Malayalam Dictionary.
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Indic Language Computing Workout, Pune
Posted on August 23, 2010
| Santhosh Thottingal
On 22nd August, I conducted a workout session with Praveen on Indic Language Computing at Red Hat Office, Pune. The plan was to solve some of the issues in Devanagari support for the encoding converter Payyans. But most of the time was spent on Introducing the concepts of Indic language computing to participants. Project Silpa was also introduced and demonstrated. Students from College of Engg, Pune and other colleges attended. Red Hat sponsored the venue at their office.
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Wikimania 2010, Poland
Posted on July 17, 2010
| Santhosh Thottingal
I left Chennai on Wednesday(8th) and reached Frankfurt airport on Thursday morning. Rest of the people from India for wikimania- Shiju Alex, Tinu Cherian, Srinivas Gunta, Arjun Rao were already reached the airport and I joined them. We reached Gdansk Airport by 12.30 PM. Our accommodation was at a students hostel of Gdansk University. Language was a big issue since most of the people does not understand English and only know Polish Language.
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Attending Wikimania 2010
Posted on July 6, 2010
| Santhosh Thottingal
I will be attending Wikimania 2010, Gdansk, Poland. This annual international conference of the Wikimedia community is from July 9 to July 11.
I will be presenting wik2cd, the tool I wrote for Malayalam wikipedia version 1.0 there in a joint workshop with wikipedia offline developers. I will be joining with Manuel Schneider, Shiju Alex, Martin Walker in the workshop titled: Creating offline version of Wiki content – Solutions and Challenges.
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