[Plone-AsiaPacific] Help to improve text search for East-Asia languages

Takeshi Yamamoto tyam at mac.com
Thu Nov 6 15:35:30 UTC 2008 

Hello Xavier,

Thank you for supporting Asia Pacific region.  Glad to hear from  
you.  :)
I agree that the web page might need to be updated from the current  
kick-off status.
We have to sort it out soon after WPD.

To consider objectives and strategies, let me give you my thought on  
AsiaPacific issue.

<BACKGROUND>
Asia pacific region involves language, cultural and political diversity.
Most Asian countries use non-English languages except Australia, NZ,  
Philippine, Singapore.
So, most of people there may not speak nor read English at all, like  
Japan.
Wide range of poverty and wealth, country by country, people by people  
within a country.
Many kind of currencies.  Huge currency value gap.
Many factories are being built with foreign money.  Agricultural  
products exporter.

<STRATEGY>
If we say Asia-Pacific region, I think we should consider wide range  
of Asia.
Considering wider-range of Asia might give more value for this group  
to be established.
Different strategies from the one which was well worked within well- 
developed countries.
We are small.  No money and no time to invest, but can make good ideas.

I think following activities could be candidates:

- Find out Asia-pacific specific requirements and implement it in  
global manner.
   So, make the Plone better to use for the people who lives in Asia.
   Text search improvement for East Asian languages is one of this area.
   Short name handling might be another headache, since OS allows to  
use local language for file names.
   These might be identified through the customer's complain,  
developer's wishes, etc. in daily life.

- Check the current status of translation files(.po) file first.   
Improve it if not enough.
   Which comes first, Egg or Chicken?  Without local language  
interface, people does not use it.
   When we found out the completeness of each Asian languages,
   let's find out foreign students or foreign workers who came from  
these countries.
   Convince them to work for free (freedom to use and free-of-charge).
   Verify and commit to Plone repository.  We need 2 person for each  
languages at least for QA.

- Collaborate to promote Plone to multi-national clients, when Asia- 
Pacific-wide or world-wide support is important.

- Collaborate to promote Plone for government area.  ODA(official  
development assistance) is huge amount.

Final goal is to spread Plone all over the Asia, of course.  But  
approach might be different than the past.
If the current way of approach works, these countries should be filled  
out with Plone already and have more participation.

I hope above issues could be a good start to discuss.

Regards.
Takeshi Yamamoto

On Nov 6, 2008, at 7:28 PM, Xavier Heymans wrote:

> Dear Takeshi,
>
> You are coming up with interesting issues. Based on experiences  
> taking place in other regions of the world, a goal of Plone Asia  
> Pacific is to become a central point were newcomers could easily get  
> an overview of the activities and contacts in the region.
>
> We have asked to get a page on Plone.org:
> http://plone.org/countries/asia-pacific/
>
> This page doesn’t aim to replace existing initiatives but  
> provide an overwiev and raise their visibility. For example solving  
> issues for East-Asia languages is a common requirement for many  
> countries. It is the kind of issue that is worth to highlight in  
> such a regional group.
>
> It could be interesting to include a page in:
> http://plone.org/countries/asia-pacific/
> This would provide an overview of what is being done, were to get  
> the info, ... The content of your email is a very good start for this.
>
> I recently explained to Virginia and Tim how the Plone Cono Sur  
> group (group focusing on Spanish speaking South America) has  
> structured their information:
> http://plone.org/countries/conosur
> They will be working on an Asia Pacific version to start with. This  
> will take some time, as they are both busy with the Plone World Day.
>
> Regards,
>
> Xavier
>
>
> On 05 Nov 2008, at 17:44, Takeshi Yamamoto wrote:
>
>> Help to improve text search for East-Asia languages
>>
>> Let me post the first initiative (requesting help in other word)  
>> for Asia Pacific area.
>> Some of you may know Japanese Plone community is working on improving
>> text search feature of plone for East Asian languages.  For  
>> example, Japanese
>> words can not be distinguished by space, as well as Chinese and  
>> Korean languages.
>> Mr. Terada, CEO of CMSCOM has stood up and worked on google summer  
>> of code
>> as one of Plone foundation-supported project this year.   
>> Unfortunately, the student
>> has gave up and it was not complete.  Terada-san has decided to  
>> make it completed
>> and started it again as his company's project.  Since that feature  
>> is valuable for many
>> people(1.5 billion people are living in Kanji region), and it is  
>> open source, and
>> we hope it could be built into out-of-the-box Plone, Japanese  
>> community  is
>> supporting this project.  We will have a sprint event for this in  
>> the World Plone Day 2008 Tokyo.
>>
>> The software current status is BETA version and you can download  
>> and try, or
>> just access to the test and play with it.  We appreciate any of  
>> your bug report
>> or suggestions.  We do not have enough testers for "non-Japanese"  
>> languages.
>>
>> Languages what we would like to cover with that bigramsplitter are:
>>
>> Japanese
>> Mandarin Chinese (Beijing)
>> Cantonese (Canton)
>> Taiwanese (Taiwan)
>> Korean (Korea)
>> Mongolian (Mongol)
>> Thai (Thailand)
>> Vietnamese (Viet Nam)
>> Jawi (Malaysia)
>> Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesia)
>> Hebrew (Israel)
>> Arabic (Middle-East)
>> etc.
>>
>> The languages which are not located in Asia, but different from  
>> English/Latin
>> languages are welcome, of course.
>>
>> The project site is here:
>> http://code.google.com/p/bigramsplitter/
>>
>> You can download the code from here:
>> http://code.google.com/p/bigramsplitter/downloads/list
>>
>> The test site is here to play with.
>> http://c2search.cmscom.jp/
>>
>> You may need an account to put some text to be searched in your own  
>> language.
>> Request your login account here.
>> http://c2search.cmscom.jp/contact-info
>>
>> Sorry for the test site is not well internationalized, but there is  
>> no problem if you
>> write your request in English.
>>
>> Thanks a lot in advance.
>> Takeshi Yamamoto / retsu
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Plone-AsiaPacific mailing list
>> Plone-AsiaPacific at lists.plone.org
>> http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/plone-asiapacific
>>
>

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