India is very rich and wide in regard to Linguistic Diversity. India has 22 constitutionally recognized languages and 12 scripts. In India, there is one Language originated from many scripts and many Languages are originated from one script and they are culturally different depending on region though using same script for different languages. Even there is wide difference for same language across different country. There are also major issues related to Indian Languages like complex orthographic representation, non-uniform mapping between script and languages, formation of complex glyph sets and other NLP problems. To accelerate the percolation ICT in Indian languages, it is necessary to enable web technology in all 22 Indian languages. This requires addressing internationalization challenges with respect to present and future web standards.
WSI (Web Standardization initiative) has been initiated at MeitY under the aegis of Human Cantered Computing Division (TDIL). TDIL Programme is engaging itself actively since 2006 with the all the stakeholders in the country to work towards internationalization of Web standards.
The vision of WSI is to enable all Web related standards with 22 Indian languages so that we can achieve seamless Web for every Indian. The objective of this Initiative is to promote and adoption of various internationalization web and internet recommendations/ Best practices among developers, application builders, and standards setters and to encourage inclusion of stakeholder organizations in the creation of future recommendations.
WSI is currently focusing of development of Internationalization requirements w.r.t all 22 Indian languages in the following areas :
• Text layout requirements
• Speech technology Standards
• Unicode Standards including CLDR(Common Locale Data Repositiry), Unicode Technical Reports
• Web Payments
• Indian languages Counter Styles
• World Wide Web Character Model: String Matching
• Other Standards such as Transliteration, e-Dictionaries, Annotation Standards, Quality Evaluation metrics etc.
Under WSI, W3C Indic Text layout task force (http://www.w3.org/International/groups/indic-layout/ ) has been constituted and is working directly under W3C Internationalization Working Group.The aim of this task force is to collect information about specific use cases in India for technologies defined in W3C specifications for Indian languages, and to report the results of its activities as a group back to the Internationalization Core Working Group, as well as to other relevant groups and to the W3C members and community. . Currently Indic Layout work continued under the scope of India International Program.
The Web Standardization activity is single platform for initiatives concerned with improving internationalization and localization of the web Standards in India.