GUWAHATI, Feb 2 - Research scientists and groups from institutions across the country will assemble here for a three-day brainstorming meet on development of Indian Language Search Engine from tomorrow.
Indian Language Search Engine has been in the design and development pipeline for the last several years, and the Union Ministry of Communication and Information Technology has formed a consortium of 12 institutes for development of a multilingual search engine for the use in digital world.
At present though search engines like Google have been dominating the search scenario, local language support in such search engines is not up to date, and many Indian languages including Assamese are not yet incorporated. The mission of this Indian Language Search Engine is to facilitate searching of contents in Indian languages, and fetching contents from across the languages and displaying those for user requirement.
This mission of the Ministry of Information Technology includes Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telegu, Punjabi, Gujarati and Oriya. Development of this search engine has been carried out with emphasis on tourism domain at the moment, and is in the final stage of development, testing and implementation.
Research and development groups from 12 different institutes will attend the three-day meet, where elaborate and in-depth discussions will take place for the final phase of development of this Indian Language Search Engine, named �Sandhan�.
The Department of Information Technology of the Government of Assam has extended necessary cooperation to welcome the groups from various institutes. The sessions will be held at the Gauhati University and the Cotton State University. Minister of Information Technology and Science and Technology Keshab Mahanta will inaugurate the main session at 9.30 am on February 4 at the Gauhati University.
The Assamese part of this research and development project is being carried out under Prof Shikhar Sarma as the Principal Investigator. On successful completion and deployment of such a system, it will facilitate the mass people with access to digital information in local languages. This will fill the wide gap that exists at present in fulfilling the information needs of Indians not conversant with English which is estimated at 90 per cent of the population.