Bangalore, June 22, 1998

A week long workshop-cum-seminar on multilingual computing technology - GIST WEEK - is going to begin in city from tomorrow, Tuesday, 23rd June 1998, which will carry on till 27th of this month. Mr. Chandrashekar Patil, Chairman, Kannada Development Authority, Government of Karnataka will grace the occasion as chief guest and inaugurate the workshop. However, this workshop is part of the national awareness mission of GIST Group of C-DAC to educate the computer-using community of Karnataka on the usage of computers in their mother tongue (Kannada).

On this occasion, C-DAC also announces the launching of a new software package - GIST-SDK - the Indian language application development tool for Windows 95/NT, on Friday, 26th June 1998 at the "Software Developers Meet".

GIST WEEK

It is a platform designed to address the people of various organizations in the state of Karnataka with an objective of eliminating the dependence on English in usage of computers. This workshop-cum-seminar is expected to be attended by the computer users from the state and central government, banking, insurance, railways, telecom, power, postal, energy, information technology industry and educational institutions. Each day's workshop begins with keynote addresses, by eminent personalities from different fields followed by on-line training and demonstration of various multilingual applications. GIST WEEK will lay emphasis on applications in KANNADA, the official language of the state of Karnataka.

Significantly, the decade long research on language technology by GIST is available today for all kinds of popular platforms of computing. The state-of-art language technologies developed by GIST are compatible with the largely used Windows, Internet, multimedia, database management applications, word-processing, publishing, etc. These are widely available in Kannada as also with other Indian languages. These breakthrough technologies will be demonstrated at GIST WEEK.

For over a decade, GIST has also developed solutions for the major applications of national importance such as Land Records Project, Indian Language Subtitling of Films, Indian Heritage content on Internet, Voter ID Card Project, Indian Language Data Communication on NIC Net and NII (National Information Infrastructure). Other than these, GIST also played a major role in various national projects where multilingual technology has been used.

Objective - Multilingual Superhighway, the NII

The major objective for such a campaign is to make an estimated 90% of population of the country aware that computer has crossed the hurdle of English language to communicate. Such an aggressive awareness campaign is necessary because the country has the vision of implementing the National Information Infrastructure where the multilingual solutions will be easier for an individual to access and avail the citizen facilitation services expected to be offered under the NII.

C-DAC is committed to play a major role in this direction by making available the multilingual GIST technology which is capable of providing the multilingual interface to this project and make NII a Multilingual Information Superhighway. With this vision C-DAC is geared to educate the masses about the basics of computer by using them in their local language. This can help people to increase the standard of life and keep in phase with fast changing globe.

GIST-SDK

The Indian Language Application Development Kit for Windows 95 and Windows NT, is a development tool which uses Microsoft's advanced ActiveX technology to provide a seamless, transparent and self contained Indian Language layer to the Win95/NT applications. It is based on COM standards, so can be used with any of the latest application development tools providing 'OLE container' support.

With GIST-SDK software, any software developer can now develop Indian language enabled applications rapidly and with ease using standard front-end development tools. After the controls are registered, they will be available on the control-palette and can be used like standard controls. No external keyboard driver to handle Indian language is required.

Visual Basic 5.0, Visual C 4.2 or later, Power Builder 5.0, Visual FoxPro, Delphi 3, Forms 4.5 (Developer 2000) are few of the front-end development tools in which GIST-SDK can be used. Any database engine supporting 8-bit storage may be used as a back end.

The Indian language data is stored in ISCII (Indian Script Code for Information Interchange) which is the current Indian Standard for input, storage, processing and transmission for Indian script text. ISCII enables alphabetic sorting, transliteration and data exchange and reusability in a uniform manner. GIST-SDK allows bilingual data input, storage and display and facilitates on-line sorting and indexing and complete editing control in 10 Indian scripts - Assamese, Bengali, Devnagari, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu.