Building Database-backended Multilingual, Multimedia Data Repositories: The aAQUA Experience

Developmental Informatics Lab Introduction aAqua’s (almost All questions answered) –An online forum for answering questions from the grassroots by the experts in the field. Bridges gaps in use of ICT –Usability –Availability –Multi-Linguality –Multi-media Support –Multi-Lingual Storage and Retrieval –Reusability

Developmental Informatics Lab Usability

Developmental Informatics Lab A Sample Thread

Developmental Informatics Lab aAqua in Operation

Developmental Informatics Lab aAqua Server Crop Doctor Crop Recommendation Keyword Browser Bhav Puchiye aAqua Interne t HTTP aAqua Offline Mobile networ k aAqua Mobile Gateway SMS

aAqua Demo

Developmental Informatics Lab aAQUA- a technical perspective Employs three tier web architecture Uses mvnforum which is based on the MVC architecture. Lucene used as search engine. Compatible with any servlet container which supports JSP1.2 and Servlet2.3 Runs on tomcat Works with unicode UTF-8 compliant Oracle 9i as well as mysql database Is integrated with open source digital library software

Developmental Informatics Lab Multi-Linguality

Developmental Informatics Lab Multi-lingual Storage and Retrieval Query in Hindi UNL Document Result in Hindi “flowers Scorch” UNL Document Info repository …The plants blossom but the flowers scorch… flower(icl>reproductive UNL graph

Developmental Informatics Lab Unicode Computers store letters and other characters by assigning a number for each. Hundreds of different encoding systems for assigning these numbers. Before unicode, no single encoding could contain enough characters. Universal encoded character set –Enables information from any language to be stored using a single character set. –Provides a unique code value for every character, regardless of the platform, program, or language.

Developmental Informatics Lab Unicode standard UTF-8 encoding –Popular with html –A way of transforming all Unicode characters into a variable length encoding of bytes. –The Unicode characters corresponding to the familiar ASCII set have the same byte values as ASCII –UTF-8 can be used with much existing software without extensive software rewrites. UTF-16 encoding –UTF-16 used when efficient access to characters is needed with economical use of storage. –Most of the heavily used characters fit into a single 16-bit code unit, while all other characters are accessible via pairs of 16-bit code units. –Better compatibility with Java

Developmental Informatics Lab Unicode Encodings C E68480 EDA081 B0 C3B6 D E F D801DC02 á t c ö d A4 UTF-8UTF-16Characters

Developmental Informatics Lab Unicode and the Web Preferred encoding form for Unicode characters on the web is UTF-8 HTTP header of a document should contain the line –Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 (for HTML files) –Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 (for TEXT files) Or in a HTML document, add the following line under HEAD the element

Developmental Informatics Lab Creating unicode databases Mysql/Oracle –CREATE DATABASE database_name CHARACTER SET character_set –CREATE DATABASE confluence CHARACTER SET utf8; –Oracle 9i supports UTF 16 also. (CHARACTER SET : AL16UTF16 ) Postgres –CREATE DATABASE database_name WITH ENCODING 'UTF8';

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