The Bridal Make-Up!
Bikram M. Baruah*
“An open dictionary being created by the people, for the people, of the people” built on Microsoft’s Technology! Why should we be dependent on a corporate giant? It makes more sense, if this dictionary is built on a software also developed by “the people”. So, a decision was made to redesign XOBDO in Open Source technologies.
Switching the database from Microsoft’s MSSQL to Open Source MySQL was not easy. A lot of planning and synchronized activities were carried out between Pallav Saikia and me with constant feedback from a number of people, primarily Priyankoo (Florida), Partha (Bhopal), Rajib (Jorhat) and Arup (JNU) between Aug-Nov, 2007. As we were developing the database from scratch, we took this opportunity to incorporate a number of new features – encyclopedic entries, word varieties, subject contexts, related words etc. Pallav did a fantastic job in transferring the existing data from MSSQL to the newly developed MySQL database.
We needed somebody to redevelop the existing frame based webpages that uses ASP to access the database to DIV and stylesheet based webpages that would use PHP to access the new MySQL database. Nobody in the group knew these new technologies at that time. We were looking for somebody to help us in this regard. I started to study these from the resources available in the internet. Priyankoo caught hold of Sakib Rahman Saikia studying Computer Science in the University of Florida where Priyankoo, too, is persuing his PhD. Sakib sprung into action… working day and night for around seven days. Sometime in October he developed few sample pages in PHP accessing the MySQL database. Finally, I got a break…. following his footsteps, I started to copy the scripts to develop the other pages. While Sakib and I busied ourselves writing the scripts, Priyankoo helped maintaining the layout and the theme of the pages using his skill of handling stylesheets. As usual we received critical review and beta-testing of our work from members like Rupankar (Delhi), Rupkamal (Mysore).
Thus, our beloved princess XOBDO got a new look … almost like a bridal make-up! We wanted to have a grand inauguration event to show off our beloved ‘bride’. We initiated an effort to have a stall and a release event in the Guwahati Book Fair. The members based in/around Guwahati were contacted. Almost twenty volunteers came forward to form a group called “GHY-Team” to organize the event. Initially Neelotpal and then Kuldeep took the lead to go to Oxom Prokaxon Porixod and find out the details. Few of them met in Nehru Park, Panbazar to discuss the details. However, soon we realized that we had to spend a significant amount of money and effort for it. Looking at the situation, few members suggested that it was not worthwhile spending so much money and effort to have a stall and the bridal show in the GBF at least for the moment. If the purpose is to get publicity, we could do it in much better way through the web and other means. Therefore, in spite of the enthusiasm of the members of our “GHY-Team”, we had to abandon the plan. However, Buljit kept some leaflets in the stall of Kiron Prakashan, a Dhemaji based publishing house he is closely associated with.
XOBDO got the bridal make-up, now needs an event to show it off. Meanwhile, the people involved wanted it to be public at the earliest for two reasons:
1) Unless we switch to the new site, we need to maintain two parallel sites.
2) The incremental data added to the old database needs to be transferred to the new database as frequently as possible.
Therefore, without really waiting for a “grand event”, very quietly all the traffics were diverted to the new site sometime in late November 2007. People gradually started to pour in to visit the ‘bride’.
FASS (Friends of Assam and Seven Sisters) organized their annual meet in January 2008 and they gave an opportunity to show our ‘bride’ to the public. We took full advantage of the event. The news media covered the event. As usual, many papers published lots of incorrect information. However, some did publish very accurate information. Buljit did a great job in tracking down wrong information and spreading the correct ones.
Of late, we have added a long pending module to handle Fokora-Jujonas (Assamese Proverbs/Idioms). We also concentrated to attract speakers of the other North-Eastern languages. Currently, we have active contributors and editors of Bodo, Khasi, Karbi, Ao, Nagamese and Dimasa. For the other languages, we are still looking for volunteers. Earlier, all search operations could be done only in English or Assamese. However, recently codes were modified to search from any language to any other language. It is really a big milestone for XOBDO.
We currently have a long list of requests from different quarters to be incorporated in XOBDO. With time, we hope to implement them all. Here is a list of few of them:
1. Contributors can submit pictures
2. Seamless interface of all the languages
3. Use AJAX to make the pages quicker and more interactive
4. Develop and integrate a voting/opinion poll system
Far Future:
I am a (day?) dreamer, love to see far into the future. I foresee XOBDO to have a number of interesting features often depicted in science fiction stories or movies (technically Natural Language Processing Tools), like (a) one tool – that can automatically translate texts from one language to another with a good degree of accuracy (b) recognize hand-written texts, (c) another computer system to read out typed texts and so on. Technically these systems are called MT (Machine Translation), OCS (Optical Character Recognizer) and TTS (Text-To-Speech) tools respectively.
Joyshree (C-DAC) and Priyankoo told me that these futuristic features are being developed in various R&D centers of India like C-DAC, IIT-Guwahati etc. for many Indian languages. May be we will have them sooner than I dreamt.
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*Bikram M Baruah is a Petroleum Engineer based in Abu Dhabi. He is the coordinator of XOBDO
March 13th, 2008 at 3:45 am
This is soul stirring. I just can not stop appreciating your feeling of belongingness for the project. This keeps you thrusting to stive for a better tomorrow. Kep it up.
March 16th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
It’s an amazing project coming from the efforts of each an every member. At first I was curious about XOBDO. But now visiting & contributing XOBDO regularly has become my inevitable habit.
No doubt XOBDO is now in a state of full grown beautiful gal. But lack of awareness of the Assamese as well as all the NE-ians have made me feel uneasy. This may not be so much important just for today. But I can ensure this will become more important than a general dictionary after 5-10 years. Thanks Bikramda for initiating such a well effort…