Generation of an efficient state of art methodology for custody, assimilation, and retrieval management of acquired Data arising out of the underwater exploration of Poompuhar Digital Heritage site in South India

This paper deals with the journey of acquiring large volumes of data in real-time underwater exploration scenarios taking place over some time and arriving at the generation of an efficient state of art methodology for custody, assimilation, and retrieval management of the data. The underwater exploration mission mentioned here is an ambitious task of carrying out the research and exploration of a cultural heritage site named “Poompuhar” on the southern seacoast of India. This task has been taken by a group of learned academicians from the Universities and scientists from ocean- based organizations. The inputs of the domain experts from the fields of Geology, Archaeology, History, Literature, Epigraphy, Computer and Software engineering, Mechanical and Electronics engineering have contributed to zeroing down on the sea locations for Data acquisition to explore the Poompuhar Heritage site. However the underwater exploration is based on a lot of hypotheses, the real-time data to be acquired and collected will extend over large geographical areas out in the sea. Further, the data has to be collected by the latest scientific vessels, instruments, and exercises that have to be spread over a while and vast areas. This poses a great challenge as to how to collect data, how to store and retrieve fruitfully the whole gambit of data suitable for all the domain experts to analyze the same in totality. Thus the data collected is very large, differently formatted, and voluminous collected over long intervals of time. Further, the data retrieval requirements are varied and dictate the execution of the submissions and hence great care is to be administered in disseminating the information suitably to the participants in this large mission. Here in this paper, it has been taken up as a case of dealing with voluminous data akin to Big Data Analysis and a state of art methodology is generated to take care of two important issues namely acquiring sufficient data from assured underwater sites and assimilating the data, processing the data in the Digital form and feeding the same for representing the exhaustive and voluminous data in a 3D form to reconstruct the Digital Poompuhar Heritage site thus serving as the real-world physical equivalent for future use. The data collected and maintained should withstand the large time frames involved in the mission and correctness and reliability of the data have to be ensured at any cost. The structure and methodology of the proposed model are formulated to be unique, tailor-made for the present situation, and made suitable enough to be seamlessly adopted by all the stakeholders in the project mission.