The Knowledge Bank of IDH-Hampi Vijay Chandru International Institute for Art, Culture and Democracy Bangalore chandru@iiacd.org Prof S Settar, the Principal Investigator of this project and a heritage scholar of repute, was unable to attend this symposium due to prior commitments. Hence this presentation, prepared by the co-PI, is focused more on the technological aspects of the project.

Big Data and Heritage The study of Greco-Roman antiquity is a data- intensive enterprise. Electronic media allow classicists to pursue both the deepest and most firmly established scholarly values and challenge their peers to rethink every aspect of their field. – Greg Crane

Why Knowledge Bank? Large volume of content, tools (algorithms and heuristics), demos have been generated. Need to “bank” the assets created. To what end? Archival and Preservation (Digital Warehouse) Academic Study and Research (Digital Library) Virtual Tourism, Education (Virtual Museums) Cloud Performing Assets Immersive Experience HPC

Knowledge Bank I: the digital library A Distributed Network of Knowledge Repositories Analogy: Main Bank plus many branches spatially scattered. Main Knowledge Repository located at NIAS Branch knowledge repositories at various investigator sites and other public access sites Challenges Distributed Search (semantic web) Persistence of data (resources beyond IDH)

Semantic Web and Knowledge Bank Standards on markup lanuages and ontologies overseen by W3C – has had weak compliance “Sweets = Semantic Tweets” (open source framework developed by a partner organization Servelots (cf. T B Dinesh) and adapted for the digital library Some virtual museum experience can also be squeezed out from these frameworks but non-immersive.

Art historians use computers and digital libraries to order, sort, interrogate, and analyse data (often images) about artworks, antiquity, etc.

Girija Kalyana, Veerabhadraswamy Temple (Lepakshi) . The top panel is from Lepakshi and the panel below from Hampi. The antiquity of Lepakshi paintings are believed to be 16th Century while an art historical debate that stands unresolved is whether the Hampi renderings are from Krishnadevaraya’s reign in early 16th century or were repainted later in the 18th-19th century. This seems like a debate that a knowledge bank (digital library) should be able to help resolve. Girija Kalyana , Virupaksha Temple (Hampi)

Illustration of Knowledge Bank as a Digital Library Search for other sites with murals in the “style” of Lepakshi Search for other sites with murals in the style of Hampi Infer the antiquity based on additional information

A Provocative Question for Digital Humanities Could resolution of this art historical issue have been aided by an Expert System employing Artificial Intelligence (rule based deductive reasoning) Cerri: intelligent expert system for art historians. Computer Science Department at Scuola Normale Superiore (SNS) at Pisa A black and magical box or a black-magical box? – Michael Greenhalgh

Virtual Museums Sarah Kenderdine, G S Rautela “Grand Spectacle” of IDH-Hampi Lepakshi: an unfinished song