Swathanthra Malayalam Computing
businessWeb Page: http://wiki.smc.org.in/SoC/2013/Project_ideas
Mailing List: http://lists.smc.org.in/listinfo.cgi/discuss-smc.org.in
Swathanthra Malayalam Computing (SMC) is a free software collective engaged in development, localization, standardization and popularization of various Free and Open Source Softwares in Malayalam language. "എന്റെ കമ്പ്യൂട്ടറിനു് എന്റെ ഭാഷ" is the slogan of the organization, which translates to "My language for/on My Computer".
SMC has been active since October 2002 and has been working to provide Malayalam language tools that work on all layers of computing including and not limited to rendering fixes, fonts, input mechanisms, translations (localization), text-to-speech engines, dictionaries, spell checkers and other indic script based language computing specific tools across operating systems. We are the upstream for Malayalam fonts and tools for popular GNU/Linux based operating systems such as Fedora and Debian. We also maintain localizations for popular Free Software Desktops (GNOME/KDE), popular applications such as Firefox and Libre Office.
SMC is perhaps the largest language technology developer community in India and collaborates very closely with government and industry, and serves as an advisory to govermental/semi-govermental organizations that determine the future of Malayalam language on computing devices. We are not just developers though, we also have linguists, journalists, Wikipedians, writers and all sorts of language users among us.
SMC also works on developing accessibility support for indic languages and maintains Dhvani TTS which supports 11 languages . Over the years, SMC has evolved to accommodate developers focused on Indic script based languages and now provides a generic web based Indic language computation framework called SILPA.
A snapshot of SMC's work is in Ohloh http://www.ohloh.net/p/smc-project
Projects
- Automated rendering testing Automated Rendering Testing system for Indic languages. At present, there is no automated mechanism to determine if Harfbuzz is rendering complex Indic text correctly or not - someone expert in relevant language has to manually inspect the output from hb-view. The project aim is to identify and implement an automated method to test the rendering.
- GSoC 2013 Proposal : Building a system and API's for accessing and updating Malayalamgrandham Bibliography Data. The proposed project aims at building a feature rich, more advanced and contributor/developer friendly version of Malayalagrandham Bibliography Data application
- Porting remaining modules & separation of template dependencies in flask based silpa The original SILPA project was a monolithic app with a fair number of dependencies and provide a large number of language processing tools.The project is currently being rewritten so that the tools can be separated and used by anyone and a flask based app which makes use of these modules to provide a web interface for these tools as well as a JSONRPC interface for other applications to make use of these tools.The current implementation requires the templates to be included in the template folder of the main Flask based app.My job will be to restructure individual modules by including their templates in their respective python packages,re-write SILPA flask to use the template files from the python package and also port the rest of the modules to the new format by creating templates and packaging them as well as testing them