Saraswati: cross‐lingual Sanskrit Digital Library

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to describe Saraswati, a cross‐lingual Sanskrit Digital Library hosted at Banaras Hindu University. The system aims to assist those who know Sanskrit and at least one Indic script out of Devanagari, Kannada, Telugu and Bengali.Design/methodology/approachThe system is developed with the Unicode standard using PHP as the programming language. The system follows three levels of architecture for search, display, and storage of Sanskrit documents. The system uses the UTF‐8 character representation system and generates on‐the‐fly transliteration from one Indic language script to another.FindingsThe system successfully demonstrates transliteration of Sanskrit text from one language to another. Saraswati is also capable of searching a given keyword across different languages and produces the result in the desired language script.Research limitations/implicationsSome languages such as Tamil (not chosen for study) use context dependent consonants, and with the present algorithm they require further refinement.Practical implicationsWith Saraswati, people can read Sanskrit documents and also perform a search for documents available in other scripts. The present system is useful for reading cross‐lingual literature. The present study demonstrates successful implementation of Saraswati over the University Intranet.Social implicationsIt is very common among scholars both in India and abroad that they learn Sanskrit with only one Indic script. The present system is helpful for such kind of scholars.Originality/valueThe system is the first of its kind anywhere and will be highly beneficial for scholars.