Pramanik Shastra: Blockchain-based Natural User Interfaces and Interaction Approach for Storage and Translation of Sanskrit Scripts

Abstract

The holy scriptures are the foundation of religion, civilization, and society. They strengthen a society's ethics and ideals. "Shastras" are Indian scriptures. Most of the important Shastras of ancient Indian civilization were destroyed by invaders, and the remaining Shastras are either too complex to understand or have been misinterpreted. Shastras must be preserved for society's ethics and wealth. Using blockchain to store vast volumes of data is efficient since the network grows stretched. Cloud storage uses attribute-based encryption to preserve security. In such systems, a private key generator can decrypt data, which can cause serious issues. The cloud is centralized; therefore, a failure can bring it down, whereas decentralized storage can avoid this. The Interplanetary File System (IPFS) overcomes the restrictions of cloud storage and blockchain when handling sensitive data. In the paper, a solution has been proposed for storing and sharing data in a decentralized way and combining IPFS with the Ethereum blockchain to create a platform where secured storage and translations of Shastras can be provided. The proposed framework is used for storing files to identify text using Web scraping, later translating the text using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and sharing the translated version of the file on the framework so that it can be easily accessed by the user as per the requirement. The proposal is evaluated with the help of IPFS, which provides a platform to store files, generate a hash value, and remove duplication as it uses content-addressing.