Technology

Technology is an integral component of many programs undertaken by the Noolaham Foundation. We use and build upon a range of technologies including scanning technologies, archiving and digital library software, educational software and collaboration tools.

The Technology Team is responsible for the strategic technology planning and infrastructure implementation for all of Noolaham's operations. Documentation/data collection, scanning, online library, project management and co-ordination--all require cost effective software and hardware infrastructure and support.

Technical Support & Maintenance

Customization, Hosting and Maintenance of MediaWiki

Currently Noolaham's digital library uses MediaWiki as the digital library software. It is being hosted in a virtual environment, using a LAMP environment. There are three main components to the digital library: content (pdf documents, html documents and image files), database containing the metadata, and the website. Data extraction from the templates, and implementation of semantic wiki are currently being undertaken.

Backup & Restoration Plan

The content (pdfs, html files and image files), database and websites are backed in four geographical locations in three continents on a regular basis. This is to ensure protection from physical or other threats, and continuation of the work.

Software, Hardware and Logistics Support

Many of Noolaham's projects are IT driven. The Technology Team fulfills the IT needs of the Foundation in several ways: undertaking software development and customization, building collaboration and project management tools, providing scanning solutions and other activities.

Preservation and Digital Archiving

Digital Library Software

Considering our growing needs we have began the process of transitioning into an advanced digital library software. Currently we are evaluating various software solutions for implementation. Multimedia, meta-data management, browsing and searching, social sharing and community features, multilingual support, work flow, access control, scalability, extensibility, maintenance, costs and development community are key considerations.

Scanning Technologies

Noolaham’s technical teams provides guidance with regards to scanners, scanning methods and process to be implemented in the Noolaham’s Scanning Centers. There are manual, semi-automatic, and automatic scanners. Currently we mostly employ manual scanners, which demand high labour. In the short term, we are planning to employ semi-automatic scanners and automatic scanners to achieve greater efficiency while maintaining the quality.

Multimedia Archiving

Increasingly images, video, audio and multimedia are used to share and communicate ideas. Digital technologies have enabled the documentation of tacit knowledge and intangible cultural heritage easier. In the first five years, Noolaham has focused on documenting text based records such as books, magazines and newspapers. With the Multimedia Arching project we are building a collaborative platform using Drupal CMS driven Mukurtu.

Web Archiving

Tamil and Tamils related content on web is temporal. Due to hosting costs, lack of maintenance or changing technologies web content gets lost. Inspired by Internet Archive, Noolaham’s Web Archiving project aims to archive informative and culturally important Tamil web content for posterity. The project involves building an intelligent vertical web crawler and a system to store, organize, search and retrieve web assets.

Dataset Development

Open data is critical for our society. Information about places, organizations, people, books, movies, media, arts, crafts etc need to be accessible to all and shared in a standard way. We work with other organizations in creating standards, and in collecting and disseminating data sets.

Data and Information Architecture

Digital Library (cross disciplinary team: Program Team)

Applying Information Architecture principles and practices for digital libraries improves archiving findability and usability. From enabling access, browsing, metadata to classification technology team works closely with the program team to design and implement the information architecture.

Virtual Learning Environment

The goal of the Virtual Class Room is to provide students open courseware for self-directed learning as well as to assist in their regular school work. This project uses Moodle learning management software. This project is in its early stage of development.

Tamil Natural Language Processing

Tamil Language Model

An open source Tamil Language Model is necessary to advance Tamil parser, OCR, machine translation, speech recognition and related natural language processing technologies. These technologies will enable Noolaham’s and other Tamil collections to be searched, translated and converted into audio. This is a long term research project.

Tamil OCR

Noolaham Foundation has identified Tamil optical character recognition (OCR) and machine translation as high priority technologies that will greatly assist with the Foundation's work. We work with university research groups primarily in the following areas: requirements gathering, benchmark preparation and data selection.