Ontology for preserving the knowledge base of traditional dances (OTD)

Purpose: Systematic organization of domain knowledge has lots of advantages in archiving, sharing and retrieval of information. Ontologies provide a cushion for such practices in the semantic web environment. The current study aims to develop an ontology that can preserve the knowledge base of traditional dance practices.

Design/Methodology/Approach: It is hypothesized that an ontology-based approach for the chosen domain might boost collaborative research prospect in the domain. A systematic methodology was developed for modelling the ontology based on the analytico-synthetic rule of library classification. Protégé 5.2 was used as an editor for the ontology using the Web Ontology Language (OWL) combined with Description Logic (DL) axioms. Ontology was later implemented in a local GraphDB repository to run queries over it.

Findings: The developed Ontology on Traditional Dances (OTD) was tested using the dances of Rabha tribes of North East India. Rabha tribes are from indigenous mongoloid community and have robust presence in South East Asian countries like Myanmar, Thailand, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal. Result from Hermit reasoner found presence of no logical inconsistency in the ontology, while the OOPs pitfall checker tool reported no major internal inconsistency. The induced knowledge base of traditional dances of Rabha’s in the developed OTD was further validated based on some competency questions.

Research Implications: In the growing trend of globalization, preservation of the cultural knowledge base of human societies is an important issue. Traditional dances reflect a strong base of the cultural heritage of human societies as they are closely related to the lifestyle, habitat, religious practices, festivals of a specific community.

Originality/Value: The current study is exclusively designed, keeping in mind the variables of traditional dance domain based on a survey of the user and domain-specific need.  The ontology finds probable usages in traditional knowledge information systems, lifestyle based e-commerce sites.