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Cultural Mapping of Villages Of IndiaAuthor: Toshant Sharma Date: 2020-03-14 Report no: IIIT/TH/2020/20 Advisor:Nimmi Rangaswamy AbstractThe domain of cultural mapping deals with capturing and representing knowledge regarding diverse tangible (physical artifacts, architectural landmarks, etc.) and intangible aspects of cultural heritage (language, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events etc.) which involve hybrid data sets from incompatible sources with different terminologies and representational schemas. Access to desired information is constrained by different terminologies for same concepts and difficulties in querying across data sets. Documentation and representation of knowledge in the domains of tangible and intangible cultural heritage along with the need for preservation of perishable data emphasize the need for specialized cataloging metadata. Semantic web can be used to ease interoperability and allow information exchange among different agents dealing with cultural aspects of a region or a community. Furthermore, the complex schema integration problem in this domain can be addressed efficiently by use of formal ontologies which provide universal schema to represent data from heterogeneous sources. One such widely accepted formal ontology to facilitate the integration, mediation, interchange of heterogeneous cultural heritage Information is CIDOC-CRM. We propose and implement an extension of CIDOC CRM ontology for the purpose of cultural mapping of villages of India. With help of four different case studies, we discuss how the framework provides an approach by which diverse cultural network semantics operating at the granularity of villages in India can be described independently of cultural data sources and in turn provide a schema allowing cultural data exchange among information systems and users. As part of one of the case studies we employ the model for construction of an open, interconnected semantic knowledge graph capturing and representing the cultural information for all the villages of India and at the same time preserving the unique cultural reality of each individual village. Building upon the Census of India data mapped to the ontological extension, we further implement different pipelines with help of custom built tools and applications to import information from subject matter experts (experts on local culture of the village), surveys and descriptive textual data to populate the semantic knowledge graph. The knowledge representation of intangible cultural heritage is highlighted through a case study and another use case of the model described is representation of the history of a village in terms of a graph of events influencing each other. The thesis also provides a critical analysis of domain of cultural mapping highlighting the generic intellectual and pragmatic challenges faced while representing cultural knowledge. Full thesis: pdf Centre for Exact Humanities |
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