E-Bhashya ई-भाष्य

Collaborative Shaastric Commentary Portal for Bharatiya Knowledge Literature

While numerous bharatiya knowledge books are available online, they are mostly in raw scanned form that is not amenable to search, knowledge mining and consumption by modern audience. This is severely hindering the spread of Bharatiya published knowledge among young generation for innovation. E-Bhashya (literally, collective commentary) is a web platform that enables the community to collaboratively understand Bharatiya texts via shared, shaastra-compliant, curated notes. It provides these notes as overlay on raw books stored anywhere on the web. Subscribers can import new books and start making group notes on this portal. Notes can be marked private, visible only to a team, or public. Technical details of E-Bhashya platform are explained in a separate document.

Features at a Glance

- Google search of entire library content for free.
- Book access based on subscription.
- Users can make comments and notes that others can see and respond to. Enables online communities around libraries.
- Shaastric analysis of content.

Shaastra-compliant Notes

E-Bhashya platform offers a structured approach to annotating texts based on well-formed shaastric conventions. These annotations can be machine-generated, manually-supplied, or manual corrections of auto-generated content – appropriately marked as such for clarity. Annotations can also be nested arbitrarily, enabling powerful expression. E-Bhashya allows API-based crawling and annotation of its content. This allows machine-learning tools to mine and augment E-Bhashya content.

Vyakarana Annotations: this involves splitting compound words into their components by both sandhi and samaasa. Users can also add vyakarana properties to words, such as linga, vachana, vibhakti etc. They can also add higher order shaabda bodha commentary.
Sahitya Annotations: this involves annotating a text with Sahitya shaastra-based properties such as chandas, alankara, bhaava, rasa, riiti, vritti, paaka etc.
Naatya shaastra Annotations: This involves annotating a text or media clip with Natyashastra concepts found in the clip such as mudras, abhinaya, bhaava or rasa depicted.
Nyaaya Annotations: this involves tagging elements mentioned in a text and their interrelations based on Nyaaya classification of padaarthas and sambandhas.
Tantrayukti Annotations: this involves tagging sentences of a text’s discourse by the tantrayukti used to enable accurate interpretation. Relations among multiple vakyas can also be tagged with sambandha tantrayuktis. This allows the semantic structure of a discourse to be visualized and texts navigated as a graph / network by concepts. This enables summarizing a book conceptually.

E-Bhashya platform provides a powerful way to network sentences, books and concepts as well as to visualize and navigate books as networks. This uses a structured approach to mind-mapping called Shaastra Maps.

Unstructured Notes

E-Bhashya platform allows generic user notes on any part of its books down to a single word.

Translations
Student notes and comments
Expert opinions
Question banks

Live Demo

To serve as a role model, SKF is executing tagging of two texts (rasaarNava (click for viewing live application) and brhat samhita) as IKS internship projects funded by Govt of India, IKS division, employing Sanskrit students.

End-user Services

We envision the following consumer services to use the E-Bhashya portal.

Online Courses
Online Proficiency Tests
Research Aids
Teaching Aids on Bharatiya texts
Cross-textual Publications spanning multiple knowledge sources on a given subject.

Training Datasets for Indic Knowledge processing Tool Development

Online Courses

E-Bhashya allows a rich and hands-on training mechanism for students of bharatiya knowledge. It exposes students to a larger portion of text via self-study and guided assignments than traditional teaching methods. Teaching a shaastra text using E-Bhashya platform involves giving reading assignments to students, training and assessing the student’s ability to apply shaastric concepts practically. Teachers can pose questions on a larger portion of a text, and students can submit answers directly on the platform. This allows peer learning, collaborative team projects and multi-textual comparative studies along with project reports that can be built on by future students over time. This level of rich engagement with bharatiya knowledge is not possible with traditional pedagogy, and can spur innovation.

Online Proficiency Tests

E-Bhashya allows thorough examination of a candidate’s prowess in a shaastra, not only in theory but also in application. We envision Shaastra Proficiency Tests to be conducted on E-Bhashya platform.

Research Aids

Teaching Aids for Effective and Enjoyable Pedagogy

Training Datasets

Governance Model

E-Bhashya portal has a multi-tier subscription model. The following user roles are supported:

Public (no login needed): All content will be indexable by search engines, and show up in standard web search results. Access to matched content will be login-protected with custom views based on user privileges.
Guest (free access with social media oauth2 login): By default, anybody can login with their social media id. They will be auto-registered with GUEST privileges. In this role, users can view some books marked for free consumption and leave comments, but not modify existing content except deleting their own comments.
Subscriber (paid annual individual subscription): a subscriber has access to specific libraries. Can add private annotations to books in those libraries and share them with public. They won’t be visible to other users directly.
Contributor (upon invitation only): a contributor can edit all content of libraries for which his team has access.
Team Admin: The portal supports the concept of a team that can represent an institution or a group of individuals. A team can have one or more subscribers with team admin This role allows them to control team membership, and access privileges to books owned by the team.
Super Admin: has full read/write access to all content and can change roles of users.

The table below lists the operations allowed for various roles. In the table below, CRUD denotes Create, Read, Update and Delete operations. Each cell indicates which operations are allowed for users in a given role on content of given type.

Role	Own content	Other content	Own Annotations	Other Annotations
Public		R		R
Guest		R	CRUD	R
Subscriber	CRUD	R	CRUD	R
Contributor	CRUD	RU	CRUD	RUD
Team admin	CRUD	CRUD	CRUD	CRUD
Super admin	CRUD	CRUD	CRUD	CRUD

Access-controlled Libraries

A library is a collection of books with its owner team. A library can be given access to other teams or public at large for specified roles.