Hyderabad, July 27, 1998

A week long workshop-cum-seminar on the trail blazing multilingual computing technology - "GIST WEEK" has begun in city today, which will carry on till 1st August 1998. However, this workshop is the part of national awareness mission of GIST Group of C-DAC to educate the computer using community in Andhra Pradesh on the usage of computers in their mother tongue (Telugu).

"GIST WEEK" is a platform designed to address the people of various organizations in the state of Andhra Pradesh 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 different segments such as state and central government, banking, insurance, railways, telecom, power, postal, energy, information technology industry and educational institutions.

Each day workshop begins with the keynote address by eminent personalities from the different fields followed by on-line training and demonstration of various multilingual applications. Hyderabad - "GIST WEEK" will lay emphasis on applications in TELUGU, the official language of the state.

"In fact GIST WEEK was earlier, successfully organized in New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore. The success of these GIST Weeks motivated us to organize such events every state capitals of the country. So, we are here this month in Hyderabad. C-DAC lay emphasis on this program, because it is the best way to create awareness about the multilingual technology among the end users of different segments. And it is an opportunity for us to get the instant feedback on our existing technology, which can be the valuable criteria for our further enhancement on this proven technology", said Chandrashekar Raje, Coordinator, GIST - Business Division, C-DAC.

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 largely used Windows, Internet, multimedia, database management applications, word processing, publishing and are also widely available in Telugu with other Indian languages. These all breakthrough technologies are going to be demonstrated at this GIST WEEK.

For over a decade GIST has 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 above, GIST has the major tie-ups with corporate giants like with SEIKO-EPSON and TVSE for ISCII Printers, with Oracle (India) for multilingual Network Computers, with Motorola for multilingual Pagers, with Modi Group for Xerox machines with multilingual panels.

GIST-SDK

GIST also announces the launch of GIST-SDK the Indian Language Application Development Kit for Windows 95 and Windows NT in Hyderabad on 1st August'98 in a software developers meet. It is a development tool that 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 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.