TN Govt to host Tamilnet conference in February

Chennai, Jan 30: Chief Minister M Karunanidhi today announced that the Tamil Nadu Government would host a two-day international conferenc...

Chennai, Jan 30: Chief Minister M Karunanidhi today announced that the Tamil Nadu Government would host a two-day international conference and seminar on Tamil in Information Technology at Chennai on February 7 and 8.

Billed as Tamilnet ’99, the conference would aim at standardising uniform Tamil keyboard and adopting a common coding standard for software in Tamil, Karunanidhi told mediapersons today. It would stress the need for bringing out more learning kits in Tamil language and focus on the use of Tamil in multimedia, Internet and computing. Though about 350 Tamil software packages were available in the world on word processing, font development, and E-mail communication in Tamil, a standardised comprehensive software was needed and the conference would discuss the subject of bringing about uniformity in using Tamil software.

The Chief Minister, who is also chairman of the Information Technology Task Force, said the conference, to be attended by about 100 software experts and delegates from variouscountries, was expected to reach a consensus on finalising a uniform Tamil keyboard layout to help the users. Though different keyboard configurations and coding systems for Tamil software tended to confuse Tamil software users, no one had taken the initiative so far to find a solution. He was confident that consensus reached on these issues in the conference would be accepted by Tamils all over.

He said the basic idea of taking the initiative was to popularise the use of computers and Internet in Tamil. The success of use of Internet by the people of the state in the proposed 1,000 community Internet centres in association with Worldtel depended on this, he added. Former Union Minister Murasoli Maran, chairman of the reception committee for the conference, and former Anna University vice-chancellor M Anandakrishnan, chairman of the sub-committee of the IT Task Force, were also present at the press briefing.

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