Re: Volunteers for verifying the quran data

[Gregg Reynolds <gar at arabink dot com>]

Meor Ridzuan Meor Yahaya wrote:

..
> So, it is a big task to educate people on all of this issues to get it
> all right.
You can say that again.  Really, a lot of translation of technical stuff 
needs to be done.  That will take a while.
> me. Anyway, I'm curious, what are you trying to achieve with this
> thing? Seems to me a very ambitious goal, which even I don't have. My

Who knows?  If you do, please let me know!

Actually a couple of things.  I got started with the whole thing when I 
first learned SGML and realized immediately how it could be used to 
create hyperlinked Arabic texts, which would make learning Arabic much 
easier.  (This was before the web).  Then I got into typesetting for a 
while, and finally Unicode.  I saw with Unicode that Arabic wasn't 
handled very well so I started thinking about how to do it right.  That 
turned out to be very interesting and intellectually challenging - 
linguistics, math, computation, lots of stuff.  I ended up thinking in 
terms of "if computation had been invented in Cairo or Damascus, what 
would text encoding look like?"  Also trying to make a good latin-1 
transliteration was a challenge.  I'd also like to demonstrate somehow 
that Bidi is not necessary for Arabic, because it would be a lot easier 
to add Arabic support to existing software without bidi.

So I guess the short answer is: I like the challenge of designing an 
encoding and articulating the theoretical principles behind it (how it 
relates to written language, etc.)  I also would like to do on the 
computer what I can do on paper, e.g. search based on root.

-gregg