Maps. I have seen them in school days only on charts, globe at HM Desk and on Atlas books.
The growth of Maps is very exponential. Nowadays, Maps plays a important role on transportation. Along with GPS, now we can reach most parts of the world without even asking a single question to anyone.
The GPS devices says the right path in English. It has been a long question for me to look for Tamil announcements on GPS. To build such system, we need Maps in Tamil. Then Text to speech system.
How can we build Maps in Tamil or such non-english languages?
My friend Srikanth Lakshmanan < srik.lak AT gmail DOT com > explored on this and found some answers.
See his results here
He wrote about it here.
http://blog.srik.me/2016/10/04/indic-maps-using-mapzen-tangram-openstreetmap/
He uses Mapzen,Tangram and OpenStreetMaps.
The results are impressive.
explore this repo for https://github.com/srikanthlogic/tangrams-indic
and contribute for further development.
What next?
We need Tamil strings for all the English strings. All the city names, town, street, nagar areas are only in English.
We have to translate all of them in Tamil.
Started a project in https://translate.zanata.org/ for a community contributed translation.
Testing it to incorporate with google translate api so that we can translate the missing words only.
The tests are going here.
Will announce once all the test are completed.
Is there any already a collection of English city, street names and equivalent tamil translation available online ?
or can we ask TamilNadu government to give if it has such a collection?
Can MozillaTN or such communities can lead this to have this map translation as one of their activities? So that we can get more volunteers and take it to other languages too.
Share your thoughts on this.
Dreaming my mobile shows route to a new area in Tamil and GPS says the route in Tamil. Can you see the same dream? Come. Let us make it real.
Going GNU 