Arab Techies proudly announce the release of the first outcomes of a four days Arabization Codesprint, which was held in Cairo, 20 - 23 May 2009.

We are releasing 10 projects including libraries to improve search normalization and indexing of arabic text for PHP, Python and Ruby, Modules and Plugins for Drupal and Wordpress that enhance the user experience of arab speaking users. and a Arabic stemmer and Verb conjugator.

But some of the missing pieces in improving and encouraging Arabic content on the web and a providing a better computing experience for Arabic speaking users are not solved by code.

Well classified open access Arabic language corpora and linguistic data is sorely missing, a point that was strongly emphasized in the 1st Arab Techies gathering.

As a modest contribution towards improving open access corpora Arab Techies has released a classified Arabic Stop-Words list

Apart from code and linguistic data some problems are better solved by documenting best practices, we proudly present the first draft of the "RTL design best practices and examples" document.

The projects are hosted on Arab Techies Projects Space. For more details visit each project page. We crave feedback on the projects' discussion pages, whether it's a bug report or a suggestion.

We started the final day of the code sprint with a go-round on each one's favorite place/location/spot limited to this universe ;-)

We went into our last round of report-backs of what everyone has done the day before: Linuxawy, Mostafa, Riham and Taha spent the last portion of the day before on stopwords, Waheed and Riham worked together on the Ruby plugin for language detection but they faced performance problems. Bassem and Khaled Hosny worked on developing a python bot for the Arabic wikipedia to fix the common spelling mistakes after they had a discussion with Taha. Alaa, Khaled Hosny and Dr. Noha had a discussion on clustering.

Mostafa has also worked on an interface for Taha's conjugator, BooDy and Slim worked on Ar-PHP refactoring and integration, Hjiouij finalised the RTL design document and Djihed documented the discussions they had earlier on social localisation tools.

Khaled Al Shamaa continued working on incorporating some of the work done by the other teams in the new version of Ar-PHP, and Amr released the FireFox Yamli extension and spent sometime packaging a Drupal module to integrate the Arabic comma as a separator for Drupal tags.

We started the second day with a Go-Round of our favorite meal, it's always interesting to learn about our slightly different cultures, for example techies from the west are fond of eating Whale Kouskous 'Kouskousy bel 7oot' which after some explanation turns out that it doesnt contain any whale at all, but they use the word 'whale' to mean fish :)

Straight away, we had another go round of report backs from each person on their progress the day before and their plan for the day:

Amr was almost done with the Yamli FireFox extension and wanted to work afterwards on a new topic, Waheed was almost done with Yamli and wanted to work on language detection, Slim who also worked on Yamli was less optimistic than Amr and Waheed because they kept finding bugs.

Info

Participants list :

ِAccomodation

Flamenco Hotel Zamalek

Venue

Swiss Club - they have a map on the website.

Venue directions

go to Kitkat square, then go int Sudan st., take the 3rd left and in the end you will find the Swiss Club

Dates

Wed 20th - Sat 23rd May 2009

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Schedule

9:30

Pickup from Hotel Flamenco

10:00

Sessions Start

11:00

Coffee Break

11:30

Sessions Continue

2:00

Lunch Break

3:00

Sessions Continue

6:00

Sessions End (Soft ending, participants can stop when they get tired or can continue after 6 if they want to.)

8:00

Dinner

Tasks

suggest a task for the code sprint, please add detailed description of the problem you want addressed, on what projects do you expect to use the code and which programming language should be used.

Arabic text normalization

Description

Normalize text for searching stripping away tashkil, kashida as well as normalize for common spelling mistakes like wrong hamza, confusion over ya2 at end of word, ha2 marbouta instead of t