Projects at OSSRC

The focus areas of the Open Source Software Division (OSSD) are Accessibility, Health Care, Localisation and E-learning. We carry out research and development in these areas

Accessibility

OSSRC is also actively involved in accessibility technology and speech recognition. Initial experiments with speech enabling of PINE( an email client )were quite successful. JNI ( Java Native Interface )was used to manipulate the C source and Sphinx was the base speech recognition engine.

Currently focus is on enabling speech recognition in Mozilla which is a very popular open source web browser.

A perspective based, adaptive, predictive text entry system has been developed by developed by Mr. Naveen Kumar and Mr. Ashish Jain for OSS divison under guidance and assistance of Dr. M. Sasikumar to enhance the text input speed and reduce errors due to typing mistakes. It facilitates text entry by anticipating words and sentence fragments. The system was developed based on the idea that if a word is following a particular sequence of words most of the times, then it is highly probable that the same word will follow the same sequence again. The source code for anumaan will be released soon.

For more information click here

Localisation

One of the focus areas of OSSD division is localisation. Localisation is the process of adapting software applications to the local market. One of the major and most important steps in localisation is translation. This involves translating all the menus and displayed messages into the local language. All the messages, menu names, etc. are extracted into separate files which are given to the translators for translation.

The team has done a lot of work in the area of localisation. The following is a list of ongoing/completed projects in this area:

SuTra is aimed to assist translators in this translation process. We try to reduce the translator's translation efforts and make available translated versions of applications in least possible time. The idea is to enable the translator to translate a string with just a few mouse clicks. This is done by intelligent suggestions made by SuTra on how-to use available translations for the new file and with in-built glossary support.

Version 1.0 of Sutra is ready. You can use the system at http://202.141.152.14:8083/sutra
The user manual of Sutra 1.0 can be found at Sutra1.0 user manual

This is a European Union funded project. The project aims at conducting Localisation courses across the country in collaboration with the Localisation Research Centre.

It has authored the 'Guide to localisation' in a joint initiative with the UNDP funded International Open Source Network (IOSN). This guide covers almost all aspects of localisation and is a beginner's guide. It starts by introducing basic concepts like character encoding, locale, collation, normalization and incrementally builds on to higher concepts like fonts and input method frameworks. The book, then, covers the strategies and frameworks available for translation and related tasks in localisation. It also introduces various tools and libraries useful in various stages of localisation. The guide also has a rich list of resources which would greatly help those pursuing localisation activity. You can download the guide from http://www.cdacmumbai.in/design/corporate_site/override/pdf-doc/localisation-guide.pdf

Moodle is an Open Source Learning Management System (LMS) which C-DAC Mumbai is using in its e-learning activities. It is a simple, but powerful LMS used by many other institutions in India and abroad. As an attempt to extend e-learning to reach community not conversant with English, we decided to localise this application into various Indian languages. We have localised the system into Hindi and seek volunteers to extend the work to other languages. The Hindi string files can be downloaded from http://www.ossrc.org.in/resources/index.html

HealthCare

After the successful organisation of an open source Heathcare Workshop, OSSRC is looking forward to carry on the momentum it got from the healthcare industry. OSSRC is exploring the possibility to undertake a Healthcare/EMR project based on Open Source and Open Standards involving the FOSS community.

Drishti is an Electronic Medical Record solution for Opthalmology. It helps to maintain various types of records like personal details, refraction records, consultation records, and others, of an eye patient. There are good interfaces to view these records by hospital personnel. There are good interfaces to go through the previous records of a patient. The whole system is divided into distinct modules broadly based on user groups in a hospital. The main functional modules of the system are registration, refraction, consultation, personal counseling, in-patient department, specialty, and administration. The system has a user group to access each functionality. The system has a drawing facility on an image of an eye to mark some of the observations like redness in a particular part of an eye. A very good error reporting scheme has been employed. The scheme makes the identification of fields in error very easy. The system can easily be customized to cater the needs of any other eye hospital.

Education

Online Assessment is featuring in number of distance-learning programs/online programs and also becoming popular in regular courses. Corporates too are favoring the use of online assessments for recruitment, training etc. Though there exist many systems which allow conducting online examinations, they all focus on some variant of multiple choice formats for ease of evaluation and administration; very few deal with descriptive type of questions. "Subjective Evaluation Framework" is a web-based system to manage examinations consisting of descriptive or subjective type questions. It is useful tool for educational organizations conducting exams that consist of descriptive type questions or a mix of descriptive and objective questions. The system allows use of paper patterns, maintaining a question bank, creating/managing question papers using a particular pattern and the question bank. Student can appear for the exam online and the examiners can also evaluate the answer sheets of various students online (manually), using various evaluation strategies like question-wise (for each student) and student-wise (for each paper). The system supports three types of users, student, paper setter and evaluator, and offers a variety of features to support their task.

Reinventing Education Portal development is a part of mission to reinvent education in our country using E- Learning and its prospects. E-Learning is effective learning process created by combining digitally delivered content with support and services. E-learning has created new dimension to education. Some features od its are Dynamism, Real time, Collaboration, Speed of delivery, Convenience, consistency, Global reach.

The Shiksha E-learning portal provides a platform to the teachers to showcase and share their creativity. CII-Shiksha would provide an opportunity to the teachers to invoke their latent potential, skill and knowledge and share it on the platform to benefit the teaching-learning process. Any innovation at your end in term of teaching tools, techniques, methodology which has worked well for your students or which you feel would work well for students would help the teaching community, if shared with others.Also, another reason behind encouraging sharing of creativity is to do away with the duplication of effort in creating something that's already created, used and is a success. At CII-Shiksha, we would like to build a repository of good and tested content created by teachers which could be made available for used by all of us.

There is a lot of interest in second language learning in formal as well as colloquial form. With the advent of Internet and computer technology there is more and more demand for computer-based tutoring systems for language learning. However, not all computer-based tutoring systems available address the pedagogy component in language learning. There is a need for a language tutoring system which not only uses technology to deliver content but also applies pedagogical component for effective personalized instruction. We have designed and developed a constructive learning environment for teaching spoken Marathi. English is used as a supporting language of instruction. Various pedagogical principles for second language learning are incorporated in the system. The tutor enables personalized instruction by adapting itself to the knowledge level of the student. The system aims to enable the user to read/understand newspapers, converse at public places (restricted domain), etc in Marathi. The system can be adapted to develop tutoring systems for various other Indian languages too.

Student Portal is a framework where anybody can post their innovative idea which can be explored as a project by the students of BE/ME/MCA etc. Students who are interested to do projects on any idea can register for it and mentors can monitor those projects. It will also help to enhance a project or idea.

General

Innovation Portal is a CII (Confederation of Indian Industry) DST dream which OSSRC is helping to carve into existance. This portal will act as a platform where people can post their innovative ideas, products or technology and analyze and build on other's ideas, and also post problems requiring innovative solutions. This way the portal will provide the innovators a canvas to project and explore their ideas which may otherwise vanish off due to lack of proper channel.

It will also help the other way, i.e. the industry may state their needs and the community will try for its solution.The portal will be source for innovator's other needs also ,like patent documentation and legal procedures etc. Thus the Innovation Portal will be one of the vital contributions to the Indian industry.