The Hindu : Move to preserve cultural heritage in digital format

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Mar 20, 2004

New Delhi

New Delhi

Move to preserve cultural heritage in digital format

By Our Staff Reporter

NEW DELHI, MARCH 19. In an ambitious move aimed at preserving the country's cultural heritage in the digital format, the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad (IIIT-A), is now working on developing a Sanskrit Net to store all the available material on the country's cultural heritage and knowledge tools for the language processing of regional Indian languages.

Being funded by the Ministry of Human Resource and Development, Ministry of Communication, Information and Technology and Department of Science and Technology, the Rs. 7 crore project aims at exploring new dimensions of computational linguistics.

Although work on the project started over a year ago, with the Institute finally getting funding from the Government, the project is now likely to gain momentum. Collaborating with the IIT-A on the project will be the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) at Kanpur and Mumbai and the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore.

According to the institute Director, N.D.Tiwari, the two main areas have been identified for work include cultural heritage resource management and language knowledge tools development. Apart from acquisition of rare books like the Granthas and Pandu-lipi, some of the other challenges for the project includes automation generation of metadata and developing indexing schemes for adding suitable annotation and providing search facility to provide easy to use interface for accessing the data.

Since majority of our written heritage is in the form of old text, the first tool that the institute would be looking at developing is a Optical Character Recognition system (OCR) for the the Devnagri script, which due to the presence of yukta-akshars does not have well defined fonts. One of the advantages of this new system would be the fact that it can be easily modified for recognising scripts for other regional Indian languages.

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