Workshop on IDN

Workshop on IDN

An awareness raising workshop on Internationalized Domain Names is being organized by C-DAC, Pune and Department of Information Technology (DIT). This is being organized in Pune on 29th October 2009. In connection with the Proposed final implementation plan of ICANN this workshop is of great importance. ICANN is a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with participants from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable.

Programme Co-ordinator & Head GIST, C-DAC Pune Mahesh Kulkarni will give welcome address. Rajan T. Joseph, Director General, C-DAC, will talk on the C-DAC’s activities and achievement in the area of Technology Development for Indian Languages. Other important talk will be given by N Ravi Shanker, Dr. Govind, Tulika Pandey, Neha Gupta and Akshat Joshi. Dr. Raiomond Doctor, Consultant, C-DAC GIST will present on the overview of the full Policy.

IDN or Internationalized Domain Names refers to the Internet Domain Names which are entered in the URL of the browser to access a site. This domain name provides a unique identity and onclicking on a given domain name, the Webpage of the particular user opens up. Hitherto IDN’s were available only in Latin characters and therefore having your domain name in an Indian language/script was impossible. ICANN and the initiative of the Government of India have ensured that you can have your domain name in an Indian language and soon be able to type: www.सीडैक.in and access the CDAC site.

Over the past three years CDAC Pune in close association with DIT and with contributions from CDAC Kolkata and Thiruvanathapuram has evolved a policy document for Internationalized Domain Names in Indian Languages. A certain number of Scripts and Languages have also been identified and the requirements for each have been detailed out in the course of meetings: Devanagari (Marathi, Hindi, Konkani, Sanskrit and Nepali), Punjabi, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Assamese and Bangla to name the major languages have been handled. With the maturity of the policy it is time to involve the implementers of the project: the Registrars, Sub-Registrars and Industry at large and make them aware of the major issues underlying the allocation of Internationalized Domain Names in Indian Languages and obtain useful feedback from them.

A large number of issues need to be deliberated upon and discussed. Given the complexity of Indian writing systems, safeguards have to be introduced to ensure that the common man is secure as far as possible from pharming and spoofing attacks. The syllabic structure of Indian languages, Variant Tables, restriction rules are some of the major focal areas of IDN which need to be thrown open to the major players for their comments. If interested to participate you can write to gistadmin AT cdac DOT in to attend.