A knowledge management system for Balinese wood carving
My thesis, published in JTIIK: keeping a Balinese carving workshop's knowledge, with an AI chatbot that answers from it.
Writing · First author · December 30, 2023 · 1 min read
My undergraduate thesis, written with Ariq Cahya Wardhana at Telkom Institute of Technology Purwokerto: a knowledge management system for Begeh Ukir, a Balinese wood carving business founded in 2000. It was published in JTIIK (Jurnal Teknologi Informasi dan Ilmu Komputer) in December 2023.
The problem
Balinese wood carving is a craft carvers spend decades learning, and much of what makes the work good, including the spiritual philosophy behind each piece, lives in the carvers' heads. Begeh Ukir's main product is the sanggah, a family shrine: in Hindu belief, the spirits of a family's ancestors live in it, in a sacred corner of the house. The business wanted that knowledge kept, so it could pass to the next generation of its people.
What I built
- A knowledge map. What the carvers know, organized into four areas: sanggah, bale, materials, and philosophy.
- A knowledge base on the web. A website where that knowledge is stored and can be looked up.
- An AI chatbot. An NLP chatbot that answers questions from the knowledge base. In our evaluation, 75% of its answers were correct.
- A method to get there. We followed the KMSLC (knowledge management system life cycle) method, and used the SECI model to turn the carvers' tacit knowledge into something written down.
Since then
Two later studies on knowledge management cite the paper: one on knowledge sharing in universities (JITUS, 2024) and one on preserving traditional arts and culture (JAMIKA, 2025).
The paper is in Indonesian, with an English abstract: read it on JTIIK.