The knowledge structure in Amarakośa

Abstract

Amarakośa is the most celebrated and authoritative ancient thesaurus of Sanskrit. It is one of the books which an Indian child learning through Indian traditional educational system memorizes as early as his first year of formal learning. Though it appears as a linear list of words, close inspection of it shows a rich organisation of words expressing various relations a word bears with other words. Thus when a child studies Amarakośa further, the linear list of words unfolds into a knowledge web. In this paper we describe our effort to make the implicit knowledge in Amarakośa explicit. A model for storing such structure is discussed and a web tool is described that answers the queries by reconstructing the links among words from the structured tables dynamically. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.