Siddha Analytics- An expert system for documenting and retrieving classic siddha medicinal information from primary literary sources.


Siddha Analytics is a novel inter disciplinary research project which explores one of the classic medicinal knowledge systems of the world, using the modern knowledge processing tools of Information Technology and Statistics. Siddha Analytics aims to systematically document and analyze a huge volume of unstructured information of Siddha system of Medicine. Siddha medicine, an age-old traditional medicine system has its literary resources written by Siddhar’s and innumerous practitioners over a period of centuries. These siddha literary resources are on a wide variety of topics like diseases, medicines, medicine preparation, treatment, Materia medica, pharmacology, food & life style. These literary resources have been stored in the form of prose’s or songs which have been either compiled as books or non-compiled and remains over in palm leaf manuscripts. The so far published literature of Siddha itself comprises of many hundreds of books written in the form of thousands of songs. These songs have innumerous medicinal prescription of classic siddha practitioners and others which have been time tested for their effectiveness in treating various disease conditions. The songs or prose’s provide a structured and reliable information on siddha medicinal products or individual drugs with any one or all of the following information : the quantity and the quality of ingredients used to produce such products, the process of preparation, the indications or diseased for which the medicine could be sued alone or in combination, the limitations and the conditions with which the medicine works.


Each medicinal product prescribed in these thousands of songs by different Siddha physicians for various ailments were not prescribed at random but was based on logical principles. The underlying logic of these medical preparations and prescriptions by various authors were based on the characteristics of the raw materials they were using for preparation and the types of ailments they were addressing. The basic characteristic of these medicinal products and its raw ingredients as explained in various siddha texts needs to be utilized for understanding the rule with which these drug formulations are made by different siddhars. The available tools for such unconventional task of unearthing the secrecy of drug combinations of a thousand-year-old medicine system is information technology, statistics and computational linguistics.


The modern programming languages and algorithms could be used to systematically explore these innumerous siddha songs for their contents and could explain the logic behind it in a more understandable retrievable way for diverse users. The first step towards understanding the huge corpus of siddha literature by various authors would be to systemically document the available literature in a digitalized form in a transferable widely used language. The systematic documentation in a universal language would allow for systematic retrieval of information in an efficient way from these literatures and allows us a platform for further analysis of these information’s. Our siddha expert system could serve as an effective tool for the systematic documentation, retrieval and analysis of Siddha literature.


As such we have developed a siddha expert system in its prototype to document and analyze nearly a hundred songs of siddha literature and have first time tried to prove the feasibility of utilizing the modern technological tools and programming languages in unlocking the traditional knowledge wealth handed over to us from thousands of years before.


The intuition and logic which governed the traditional medicinal systems are much important in the 21st century when the limitations of modern medical system are being more realized in the form of drug resistance, emerging pandemics of communicable and non-communicable diseases, remerging old infections, drug side effects and increased costs of new drug interventions. We open this siddha expert system for the world to use and test its novelty in transferring the age-old medicinal knowledge into a useful and understandable information for anyone with interest towards siddha system and commitment towards the benefit of larger society.