Yes, we need to get it under a suitable license. If the technical issue related
to OCR is resolved, we can talk to them about releasing the content into public
domain.
- Sundar
"That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for
the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted."
- George Boole, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture
From: Shiju Alex <shijualexonline(a)gmail.com>
To: wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Sent: Mon, November 15, 2010 12:02:42 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Tamil Encyclopedia merge into Wikipedia.
I have a query.
What is the license of Tamil Kalaikalanjiam? Did Tamil Nadu government or Tamil
Virtual University had officially announced that this Encyclopedia is released
in Public Domain or in some creative commons license so that we can reuse the
content. If yes, we can very well reuse the content. Otherwise it will be
copyright violation. So kindly verify this.
Let us not assume that since it is published by Government it will be in pubic
domain. In India that is not the case.
In 2008 December, Kerala Government has officially announced that it is
changing the license of similar encyclopedic project in Malayalam
(sarvavijanakosam) to Free documentation license so that Malayalam wiki
community can reuse its content to develop Malayalam wikipedia. Governmant has
officially announced it. Kerala Government has also set up its own wiki (to help
us) for Sarvavijanakosamand they are slowly digitizing the content and posting
in its own wiki (
http://mal.sarva.gov.in). They have completed some 2,900
articles now. We are reusing this content to enhance many of the existing
articles. But we are not copy pasting the entire content due to various
reasons. The main reason is, the content need to rewritten as per the style of
wikipedia.
I really have doubt about the efficiency of current OCR softwares for Indian
languages. It is still under development. The existing solutions are not good.
I am not sure about Tamil OCR softwares.
Shiju Alex
On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 11:33 AM, Murali Kumar <pthooran(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
Dear Wikimedia India,
As you probably aware the Govt. of India, immediately post Independence started
multiple Indian language encyclopedia projects to stream in Science and
Technology. The Tamil language encyclopedia was completed
[
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_Encyclopedia]
I'm pleased to report Tamil Virtual University has scanned in the Tamil
Kalaikalanjiam / Tamil Encyclopedia [Please see Reference 1 below].
I was able to download the material via the wonderful wget command and the
'convert' (from imagemagick lib) in GNU/Linux. However each of the 10 volumes
is close to 700 MB without compression.
I would imagine, the people behind this mammoth task (pre-internet era) would
have liked it to be merged into a Wiki type format, which would make it a truly
living document in-sync with the times.
I do not have any experience with 1) Tamil OCR software and 2) Automated updates
to Wikipedia.
Can anyone take the lead on this project ? It will help boost the number of
quality, articles in Indian languages. The Children's encyclopedia is being
scanned and has a lot of great visual content.
I have uploaded a sample (10 MB) PDF file at
https://sites.google.com/site/periasamythooran/kalaikalanjiam/kalaikalanjia…
if you are interested to give it a spin.
Thanks,
Murali.
1.
http://www.tamilvu.org/library/libindex.htm and click on Kalaikalanjiam /
Tamil Encyclopedia.
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