Modularized Transliteration Engine

Applications today that serve transliteration provide only a limited number of internally supported systems. The information communities coping with toponymic issues must be able to easily add new systems to a transliteration engine, extend or update an already supported system. These additions, updates and extensions must also be readily shared within a community of interest utilizing the GIG. Our solution is a versatile, GIG centric architecture and modular architecture for sharing transliteration data and rules expressed in a simple yet power language. Transliteration definitions can be composed online in a “wizard” interface or with any text editor and uploaded to a community repository. The meta-language applies an inheritance model which allows departments to make their own local extensions to a transliteration system in the repository to serve a particular purpose without impacting other users. The architecture includes a library of APIs for the transliteration engine to work both online as a “web service” or offline as a stand alone application where transliteration definition files would be read from a local directory. Transliteration into multiple systems at once is possible as well an inter-script text matching service where script is first folded into the IPA system.