NDLI-UNESCO International Symposium on Knowledge Engineering for Digital Library

Design (KEDL 2019) in association with IIT Delhi on the theme - “Smart and open
technologies for digital library
Held from 9th to 11th December 2019 at Seminar Hall, IIT Delhi
A report

At the outset, I would like to acknowledge the consent and the support given by the management
and the authorities to attend and participate in this symposium at IIT New Delhi. 
The NDLI-UNESCO International Symposium on Knowledge Engineering for Digital Library
Design 2019 in association with IIT Delhi had come out with its second series of knowledge-
sharing events coordinated by the National Digital Library of India, scheduled on 9-11 December
2019 at Seminar Hall- IIT Delhi, India.
The primary objective of these series was sharing of technical, policy, administration related
knowledge about digital library design. The first symposium of this series was held in October 2017
with a central theme of collaboration among digital libraries around the world. More than 30
speakers of international repute have deliberated on different aspects of digital library design.
Different deliberations and sessions converged to a crystalized thought: “Openness is the key to
mutual growth and sustenance”. This very thought had naturally become the theme of the second
version of the symposium: “Smart and Open Technologies for Digital Library”.
The NDLI-UNESCO International Symposium on Knowledge Engineering for Digital Library
Design 2019 focused on emerging technologies in a digital library, digital preservation; cultural
heritage, human aspect in DL service design, satellite programs, user engagement and content
strategy and modern information retrieval systems; knowledge engineering. To cover these topics
more than 20 eminent speakers presented their views.
The National Digital Library of India is a single-window platform that provides learning resources
intending to make e-learning and education accessible to all and to bring to users of all
demographics, digital repositories from India and the world. NDLI is a national mission on
education through the Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT) project developed
by the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, aided by the Ministry of Human Resource
Development (MHRD), Govt. of India.
The Inaugural session was chaired by Dr. Hezekiel Dlamini, Advisor for communication and
Information, UNESCO, New Delhi; Dr. Ramgopal Roa, Director IIT Delhi, Prof. Partha P.
Chakrabarti, PI, NDLI, IIT Kharagpur, Prof. Partha Pratim Das Jt. PI, NDLI & Professor, IIT
Kharagpur; Paul, Clough Prof. Search and Analytics, Information Schools, the University of
Sheffield and R. Subrahmanyam, Secretary (HE), MHRD, Govt. Of India was available through
Video Conferencing. (I was not able to attend this inaugural fully as I was late and reached almost
at the concluding remarks of the inauguration session)

There were 9 sessions 20 eminent speakers; 2 experience sessions and 1 breakaway session at
UNESCO, New Delhi Office.

This symposium was unique as we were exposed to the various dimensions in which experts of the
multidisciplinary field of studies. The focus was on Open source software, open technologies and
open access. It gave us an overview of the upcoming technologies, the importance of
standardization; protocols for data mining; IPR and Copyright issues and handling the same;
Museumology, a virtual walkthrough of heritage sites declared by UNESCO.

9th December
The first session chaired by David Bainborg Professor of Computer Science, University of Waikato
and Director of the New Zealand Digital Library Research Project; Dr. Plaban Kumar Bhowmick,
Co-PI, NDLI & Assistant Professor, IIT Kharagpur gave the KEDL 2019 program Overview and
the way the thought process has gone in to coming to the theme of teh symposium and what is
expected as an outcome. Prof. Partha Pratim Das gave the overview of the Content and technologies
used in NDLI since its inception in April 2015 to its launching in June 2018 to till date. He
acknolwedge the support received in the process from Europeana, RightsStatement.org and
UNESCO. He said NDLI reinforced its already strong research agenda to include support of Data,
metadata technologies like interfacesm search and OCR for Indian Languages, Domains like
Medical and Law and AI Platform as a generic problem solving tool. He shared his desire for
support from the Librarian Community in curating the data with standard vocabulary and taxonomy.
The next keynote was by Prasenjit Mitra, Professor of Information Sciences and Technology,
Associate Dean for Research, Pennsylvania State University on Text Mining techniques in Digital
Libraries - he shared that inorder to enable more efficient and improved search and eventually
question and answering, researchers have build text ming based tools. He gave an example of
Success in information extraction such as CiteSeer, ChemXSeer and ArchSeer. He then explained
how in order to enable scholars to find and read about related work, they have designed a
recommendation system called RefSeer. RefSeer takes a input a single title or an abstract/ paragraph
of text, or even a whole text documen. It suggests which documents should be cited where. Further
more it generates references for a document automatically and ranks them in the order of their
importance.

Teh