Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Digital Inventory of Cultural Heritage & Traditional Knowledge: Case for Indonesian Open Digital Library of Culture

Abstract:The Indonesian Digital Library of Culture (Perpustakaan Digital Budaya Indonesia, PDBI; this http URL) is a participatory platform that has collected tens of thousands of entries on Nusantara cultural heritage through public contribution since 2007. Manual contribution faces three structural barriers: coverage (knowledge is scattered across languages and sites), integrity (open sources mix authentic documentation with noise), and completeness (subjects are recorded but their data remain shallow). This paper presents a methodological framework for autonomous, AI-based harvesting of cultural knowledge from the open web, designed to expand corpus coverage while intensifying per-entry data depth. The methodology is organised as a five-stage economic funnel: focused crawling, multilingual extraction and canonicalisation, vector encoding with blocking, agentic decision-making, and idempotent publication, under the principle of deterministic orchestration, agentic decisions. Each stage is formalised: funnel economics and optimal filter ordering; crawl-frontier dynamics as a subcritical branching process that explains the necessity of recurrent re-seeding; fact-level novelty via a containment measure; Bayesian multi-source evidence fusion with elevated publication thresholds for sacred categories; exactly-once effects via idempotent upserts and the transactional outbox; sliding-window inference budgeting with a reservation protocol; statistical quality auditing; and seed selection as submodular coverage maximisation. The framework retains four high-value human roles: curator of direction, escalation approver, quality auditor, and guardian of meaning, while machine autonomy is raised in stages. Ethical, legal, and cultural-sensitivity implications are discussed, including the architectural guarantee that the machine never overwrites human contributions.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Digital Libraries (cs.DL); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

H.1.2; H.3.6; H.3.7

arXiv:2609.08105 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2609.08105v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.08105 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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