English-Tamil Bilingual Thesaurus Hyperlinked to an Online Tamil-English Lexicon to Support Classical Tamil Studies – Application of WINISIS and GSDL

Describes the application of the open source software WINISIS of Unesco and Greenstone Digital Library (GSDL) of the University of Waikato, New Zeeland in designing and developing an English-Tamil bilingual Thesaurus hyperlinked to the online Tamil Lexicon (TL) maintained by The University of Chicago. WINISIS has very good indexing and hyper-linking facilities but is not Unicode compliant to accept Indian Languages such as Tamil; however, GSDL is Unicode compliant and data entry and display in Tamil script is feasible. Exporting records from WINISIS to GSDL, data entry in Tamil script, searching using Tamil terms in Tamil script, the same transliterated into Roman script, and terms in (normal) English, hyper-linking within the thesaurus, and linking to and searching and retrieval from, the online TL and display are demonstrated with screen shots.