Databases in Indian Languages:Some Issues

Abstract

Not much progress has been made in India regarding machine readable databases containing records of materials in Indian languages in the languages and scripts of the items. Major projects that have been initiated or completed include i) machine readable version of the National Bibliography of Literature, ii) Tamil collection of the Roja Muthiah Research Library in Chennai and iii) collection of the library of the Deptt. of Indology of EFEO. Discussions regarding the use of Indian language scripts in the designing of language databases are made by citing the provisions of different codes and standards. Based on the experience gained in a project for the creation of multi-script database, the authors describe some issues related to multilingual databases, multilingual thesaurus, compatibility between different languages and provide few suggestions. There is a need for developing multilingual thesaurus in Indian languages to facilitate indexing and searching of materials available in Indian languages and scripts.