The State government should create an Internet Tamil Development Fund, M. Anandakrishnan, chairman of the local organising committee of Tamil Internet Conference (TIC)-2010, said here on Thursday.
Participating in the inauguration of the seminar of the World Classical Tamil Conference and TIC, Dr. Anandakrishnan said centres of excellence in seven areas should be established in different universities of the State.
A sum of Rs.10 crore could be set apart for each such centre. The areas were Tamil computational linguistics, search engines-automatic machine translation, Tamil in handheld devices, methodology to teach computer technology in Tamil, character recognition, data base- dictionary and e-governance.
He suggested that the University of Madras and Anna University-Chennai set up the proposed centres on Tamil computational linguistics and search engines and automatic machine translation respectively. He added that the University of Madras had started working on Tamil computational linguistics.
Seeking the support of Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi, he said financial assistance for further studies in the areas would help develop Tamil on the internet.
The subjects being discussed at the conference were blogs, Wikipedia, dictionaries, open source studies, search engines, e-governance and character recognition. These were well-researched papers and it was essential to synchronise the studies and come out with a single approach for each topic. Such funding for further studies in these areas would help develop Tamil on the internet.
Dr. Anandakrishnan wanted participants of the TIC to chalk out ways for sustaining interest in Tamil computing.
