Xobdo.org is the first online

Assamese Assamese may refer to: * Assamese people, a socio-ethnolinguistic identity of north-eastern India * People of Assam, multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic and multi-religious people of Assam * Assamese language, one of the easternmost Indo-Aryan language ...

dictionary to become available online on 10 March 2006. As of 6 August 2011 the database of this dictionary contains 37013 words of Assamese language. This is a

wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pu ...

, where anybody can contribute and edit words in the dictionary provided they have a substantial knowledge of the Assamese language. Moreover, the dictionary has the facility to categorize the words as per their origin, nature and locality. It also has the facility of incorporating encyclopedic entries. This

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Wikip ...

uses

UNICODE Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

fonts which ensures global visibility of Assamese fonts when users set their

character encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values tha ...

option to Unicode (UTF-8). The dictionary is the brainchild of Bikram M Baruah, an

petroleum engineer based in Abu Dhabi. Later many interested people specialized in different areas joined as the working force behind this dictionary. In 2007 xobdo.org added multiple interfaces to include 17 more languages spoken in the

North East India , native_name_lang = mni , settlement_type = , image_skyline = , image_alt = , image_caption = , motto = , image_map = Northeast india.png , ...

Khasi Khasi may refer to: * Khasi people, an ethnic group of Meghalaya, India * Khasi language, a major Austroasiatic language spoken in Meghalaya, India * Khāṣi language, an Indo-Aryan language of Jammu and Kashmir, India See also * Khasi Hills * G ...

, Dimasa,

Bodo Bodo may refer to: Ethnicity * Boro people, an ethno-linguistic group mainly from Northwest Assam, India * Bodo-Kachari people, an umbrella group from Nepal, India and Bangladesh that includes the Bodo people Culture and language * Boro cu ...

Karbi Karbi may refer to: Places * Karbi, Armenia * Karbi Anglong Plateau, an extension of the Indian Plate in Assam, India * Karbi Anglong district, a district of Assam, north-eastern India Other uses * Karbi people, an ethnic group of North-east ...

, Nagamese, Garo, Ao,

Mizo Mizo may refer to: *Mizo people, an ethnic group native to north-eastern India, western Myanmar (Burma) and eastern Bangladesh *Mizo language, a language spoken by the Mizo people *Mizoram, a state in Northeast India *Lusei people, an ethnic group ...

, Mishing, Tanii (Apatani), Monpa, Meitei-lon, Bishnupriya,

Chakma Chakma may refer to: *Chakma people, a Tibeto-Burman people of Bangladesh and Northeast India *Chakma language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by them **Chakma script ***Chakma (Unicode block) Chakma is a Unicode block containing characters for ...

, Kok-Borok, Kuki, and Tanchangya aimed at giving a multilingual edge to the dictionary. Currently XOBDO gives a platform for 27 languages of North-East India, along with English. However, the database for these languages is still substantially small.

Authorship and management

A group of volunteers are responsible for adding words at XOBDO database. As of now the website has two levels of volunteers: "contributors" and "editors". A contributor enters an

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national id ...

and its corresponding Assamese word to the temporary database. Afterwards an editor assigns a unique "idea ID" to the corresponding English and Assamese words and carries on other editing works, if required, to match the standards of XOBDO. After assigning the idea ID the words are added to the main database ready to be retrieved by a user.

Technical details

Initially xobdo.org employed

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

server tools and technologies. It ran ASPs on

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

IIS and the primary database on

RDBMS A relational database is a (most commonly digital) database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A system used to maintain relational databases is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Many relatio ...

based on

Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system developed by Microsoft. As a database server, it is a software product with the primary function of storing and retrieving data as requested by other software applications—which ...

. However, in 2007it moved to

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

technology and started running

PHP PHP is a General-purpose programming language, general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementati ...

s on Apache and an

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database ...

References

{{Reflist

External links

XOBDO: An Online Assamese Dictionary

Learn Assamese

Xophur Xobolikoron Achoni

XOBDO.ORG Workshops: A series of workshops on Assamese Typing in Unicode
XOBDO XOBDO Assamese language Internet properties established in 2006