Dear Murali,
Thanks for your efforts. Natkeeran, an active Tamil Wikipedian, has also downloaded the entire encyclopaedia. He is also stalled at the OCR stage. There are some Tamil OCR projects at IISc Mile lab under Prof.A.G.Ramakrishnan and some other government-supported labs.
However, I'm yet to see one that is publicly available and ready to use. That said, we're still working to get even an alpha version for this purpose.
I would welcome you to connect with Natkeeran (copied) to take this further.
- 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: Murali Kumar <pthooran@hotmail.com>
To: wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Sent: Mon, November 15, 2010 11:33:22 AM
Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] Tamil Encyclopedia merge into Wikipedia.
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.
Thanks,
Murali.