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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