Digital Preservation of Cultural Heritage: An Ontology-Based Approach

Abstract

The aim of the project is to design and build a digital portal which will document, organise, and preserve aspects of Balinese cultural heritage and related knowledge for the benefit of the wider community and the younger generations in particular. We present the details of our research dealing with one aspect of Balinese culture, the Balinese traditional communication system (kulkul), undertaken in the Indonesian island of Bali. This knowledge is held largely in the tacit form in the Balinese community and tends to be poorly documented and fragmented. A basic ontology of key kulkul-related concepts and terms and their interrelationships was developed to support the semantic searching and browsing of the online portal and related resources. Much of the content for the portal was acquired through community-based crowdsourcing. We also discuss the procedures employed to test and evaluate the digital portal prototype.