Visualizing Indian Heritage Digital Library Metaphor
Nagnath Ramdasi , Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, India

Session: Society/ Impact: Representing Civilizations

India’s most valued and revered gift not only to Herself but also to the entire humanity is its profound and timeless heritage. This heritage encompasses almost every aspect of human inquiry, exploration and existence covering philosophy and religion, language and literature, metaphysics and sciences, polity and social living, habitat and architecture, dance and music, and arts and crafts. It is for this reason the Indian heritage is to be properly grasped, understood and apprehended and made accessible to as wide as audience as possible, before undertaking a work of creation of ‘digital library of Indian heritage’. However, it is not that easy task. In Indian context, concept of heritage is explained in detail taking into account the broader vision of humanity. A fundamental problem associated with the new classes of visual data and their related analysis is that they focus, despite their appearance, on abstract information, which does not automatically map onto the physical word. Thus, many interesting classes of visual information have no natural and obvious metaphorical representation. It is necessary to visualize the complete picture of the heritage tree, so that a logical flow with more authenticity can be achieved to put it in digital form. In this article, effort is to unfold the structure of Indian Heritage to express it in the form of Visual Metaphor Model.

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