The Tamil-English Bilingual Internet Information System -
The TamilWEB is an experimental collaborative project between National Institute of Education/Nanyang Technological University and the Internet Research and Development Unit(IRDU)/National University of Singapore.
Dr Tan Tin Wee, who was the former head of Technet and the present head of IRDU, and
late Mr Naa Govindasamy, a Lecturer at the NIE/NTU are the collaborators of this project.
Mr Leong Kok Yong, an Analyst Programmer with the IRDU, is the one implementing the technical stuff of this project.
This project is part of a larger (NSTB) National Science and Technology Board funded research
unit. The TamilWeb is in line with The National Computer Board's mission (IT2000) to drive Singapore to excel in the information age.
At present there is no Tamil Information System on the Internet which provides a display system in Tamil and English simultaneously on the Text Mode using a Tamil-English single font file. There are a few servers, which are providing Tamil script using GIF image files. Tamil Eelam Page is very active in this direction. Tamil Nadu Home Page, and Tamil Electronic Library are other popular Tamil Web Sites on Internet. At the University level, there are only two universities which are providing Tamil Information On Internet.
Institute of Indology and Tamil Studies at Koeln University, Germany is providing an Tamil Information System using Tamil Transliteration, at their Gopher site. The Tamil Studies at the University of
Berkeley is also providing Tamil related information using GIF files.
Since both National Computer Board and the Technet (now known as Pacific Internet) have completed the preliminary stage of implementing an Experimental Chinese WEB server in Singapore, the
Collaborators thought of exploring and creating a Tamil-English Bilingual Internet Information System in Singapore.
With NIE project collaborator, late Mr Naa Govindasamy provided his Tamil-English True Type Fonts, the Input System and the Tamil Language expertise, combined with the Internet R & D Unit's Internet expertise at the Computer Centre, National University of Singapore, this novel Tamil-English Internet Bilingual system has been devised. Together with the Chinese system, Singapore's Information super highway can now rendered in all four official languages, English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil.
A Prototype was successfully tested at the launch of the POEMWEB on 27 October 1995. Spurred by this
success, we have demonstrated the utility system by building a series of Tamil-English Web Pages on the Internet. We hope that more interest can be instilled among the Tamil community in Singapore and abroad, to use this new technology.
Along the way, we have made more resource available and also added many user-friendly facilities. Our Java-based keyboard mapper applet allows you to type and see your
Tamil keystroke instantly. You should try it out at the searching engine page. We have also introduced a Tamil Quiz for you to try out your language skill.