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The Tamil Internet 2001
Conference and Exhibition (TI2001), the fourth in the
series, was held from 26-28 August 2001 in Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia. TI2001, with the theme 'Pathways to Progress' was
co-organised by the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) and the
International Forum for Information Technology in Tamil
(INFITT). It was the first time that a Tamil Internet
conference was organised under the auspices of INFITT, which
was established in July 2000.
Exhibition
The exhibition attracted a total of 30,000 visitors over
three days. A major impact of this exhibition was the
dissemination of information and technology relating to
Tamil computing and Tamil Internet to a large segment of the
local Indian population for the first time. The event
provided an extraordinary opportunity for interactive
exposure to new technologies as well as an appreciation of
how much Tamil language has progressed as an integral part
of Internet. These included many innovative software
products in Tamil such as digital dictionaries, computer
games, Tamil Front-End interfaces, and multimedia
educational software. For both the Malaysian and overseas
Indian business communities, the exhibition provided a
platform for networking and business opportunities. The
exhibition also featured many software and hardware that
enriched the learning environment for Tamil and other
subjects through IT.
"Net For Life" Campaign
One special feature of TI2000 in Malaysia was the
nation-wide campaign to promote Internet awareness and usage
among the Indian community. Divided into three segments --
"Web@8" aimed at primary school children, "eSkills@15" aimed
at teenagers, and "eSeniors" aimed at senior citizens -- the
campaign was launched in July and within two months had
exceeded its target by reaching out to more than 70,000
people. The campaign is continuing unabated.
Conference
The conference was attended by about 750 delegates from more
than a dozen countries. Some 50 speakers addressed a wide
spectrum of issues such as teaching of Tamil through IT,
Tamil implementation in Unicode and on different platforms,
developing optical character recognition (OCR), internet
search engines, natural language processing, Tamil in Linux,
speech synthesis in Tamil, building Tamil cyber communities
and business networks. The conference also became a vast
platform for interaction among Tamil internet related
scholars, technologists and end users.
Recommendations & Resolutions
At the end of the three-day event, both the Conference and
the INFITT Constituent Assembly made many recommendations
and resolutions for the consideration of governments,
international and national organisations, corporate bodies
as well as individuals.
The following is a summary of the key recommendations and
resolutions:
Technology
The INFITT Executive Committee (IEC) resolved the
problem of numerous font encoding schemes by recommending only two 8-bit glyph
encoding schemes, TAB and TSCII, with the provision for seamless conversion
between the two for information storage and exchange through the Internet. Usage
of the monolingual TAM scheme was also recognised as a viable scheme wherever
appropriate. At the same time, developers were urged to adopt Unicode for Tamil
character encoding and use it in global application software so as to reduce
dependency on the 8-bit glyph encoding in the future.
Language
The Working Group on Glossary of Technical Terms in Tamil Computing recommended
a list of about 250 technical terms. These terms were considered essential for
tasks such as development of screens and web pages in Tamil and for machine
translation of documents and speech processes. This list of terms will be
available at the INFITT website: www.infitt.org
Content
The Conference noted with regret that some
pioneers in Tamil content on the web had suffered business losses due to
unfavourable economic factors. However, the Conference was confident that the
scope and business opportunities for Tamil content on the web would expand
considerably and it urged content developers to press ahead with their efforts.
The Conference also expressed the hope that the limiting of font encoding
schemes to just two would greatly encourage the rapid growth of content as well
as content management.
The Conference also urged the governments and other concerned organizations to
embark on outreach programmes on a large scale so as to benefit people of all
ages and economic classes. In this context, the Conference noted with
appreciation the Malaysian campaign, ?Net-For-Life?, aimed at children, youth
and senior citizens. Another good example of outreach programme is the setting
up of electronic kiosks in rural and remote areas of the country to bring
valuable and not easily accessible information.
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