The COVID-19 pandemic adversely impacted various industrial sectors of India as well as other countries across globe. In India, impact is resulting to a negative growth rate in economy. Many sectors were performing good before the pandemic but now they have been pulled down by this pandemic. So, it is very much required to analyze and cater the data about those sectors which are badly impacted by pandemic, these sectors play vital role in Indian economy. One of the most important sector of Indian economy is banking sector which is responsible for all the financial activities going on in the country and working as a supporting hand to all of the industries in term of financing, credit, transactions, collection and payment and so on. There are so many reports containing numerous data are in public domain stating the effects of this virus pandemic. The data is not only in physical form but also it is scattered in various format over the internet. Though the data amount is enormous, the major problem is to get the appropriate data according to the user needs. The databases available online are being regularly updated but these databases are not able to provide inference over the knowledge already stored. By using inference capability, we can fetch latent and indirect information out of the knowledge base. Various ontologies for Covid-19 are available online but they do not focus on the performance of banking sector of India during Covid19. So, many times users do not get appropriate information according to the imposed query. This article attempts to highlight the repercussions of the Covid-19 in the performance of the Indian banking sector by creating and evaluating the largest comprehensive knowledge base called ontology (Covid19-IBO) in order to get semantic information, in continuation of the same we address few important research questions with respect to Indian economy.
Indian economy basically depends on the three sectors namely primary sector, secondary sector and tertiary sector and all the three sectors are being majorly supported by banking sector. Banking sector is providing the financial support to all these sectors by disbursing loans, advances, short term credits, issuing letter of credit, bank guarantees etc as its traditional work. Apart from it the new phase of Indian Banking resembles in work like providing forex support, digital banking, e-commerce, telebanking, e-kiosk and many more. You cannot imagine rapid growing economy without banking support. If banking sector get impacted by any obstacle its consequences will definetly be borne by all these three sectors which are pillar of the Indian economy.
This pandemic appeared as “black swan event”
that needs immediate action from government to
help resume economic stability through banking
channel [
Therefore, investigation of the impact of Covid19 from the large amount of distributed data is very vital to prevent the downfall of the economy and the minimize the pandemic effect. It is also essential because this study will be used as a touch bearer in future if any of the pandemic impacts like Covid-19. This paper offers the Covid19 impact on Banking ontology (Covid19-IBO) that provides semantic information about the impact of the Covid-19 on the banking sector of India. The major contributions of the paper are listed below: • Development of Covid19 Impact on Banking ontology (Covid19-IBO) • Evaluation of the Covid19-IBO by different evaluation approaches
The rest of the paper is divided into six sections. Section 2 describes existing work. Section 3 discusses some research questions that is handled by developed ontology. Section 4 shows the development and evaluation of the Covid19-IBO. Section 5 emphases the result and discussion of the proposed work. Section 6 shows the results of subjective testing and last section concludes the paper.
Covid-19 pandemic adverse impact the Indian
economy. To control the flow of the virus, GoI
announced a nationwide lock down and various
policies to help the people. Dev and Sengupta [
The Covid-19 data is available on the
internet in various format. WHO provides
multilingual Covid-19 database that updates
regularly and contains all the information about
Covid-19 [
The available different format of data (text documents, video, audio, databases and ontologies) contains the detailed information about the Covid-19 disease. After studying the literature, we claim that the available databases and ontologies that provide information according to the user queries do not have the complete information about the impact of Covid-19 on Indian banking sector that play vigorous role in the growth of Indian economy.
By the current article, three important research question are addressed that are listed below: RQ1. What are the necessary steps to minimize the loss to banking sector by Covid-19 pandemic? In current situation by the cause of outbreak of this virus pandemic, Indian banks need to review the portfolio in asset and liability side, for all the discussed cases to easily grasping the negative effect. This present economic situation warns more stress evaluation that might show straight implications for settlement that are make by Indian Banks for current time. Finding the high-risk sectors/areas/corporates/individuals and reevaluating the credit risk provisions related with loan for various economical cases is inevitable. RQ2. What are the major challenges for Indian banking sector during Covid-19? During the virus pandemic, major production units were closed or partially working. Entertainment, Aviation, Tourism industries are badly impacted. Due to the same liquidity in market needs to increase with keeping an eye to lowering down the NPA. This is major challenge for banking industry. For the same, RBI has infused liquidity of about 3.2 % of GDP in the system. Now banks can lend to reconstruct / support badly impacted industries but taking a lighter risk. Right now, many SMEs and MSMEs are bound to shut down their operations, surely it is indicating towards increasing of loan default cases. Though as a cushion RBI has allowed moratorium period, it is not enough to meet the requirement of industries. Hence RBI has to make all efforts to meet the challenges and take the banking industry in right direction.
RQ3. How much Indian banking sector prepared for effects of Covid-19 on economy? Preparation of Indian banking sector lies on sustainability of this virus in a long-time span, it also depends on nature as well as intensity of the shocks given to economy. In current pandemic time, future of banking sector depends mainly on designing the policy and their implementation now. RBI's proactive approach and stabilizing role is need of hour. However, RBI mainly tried to reduce the repo rates and increase the liquidity in economy. By pumping fund in the banking system without proactive assessment fiscal measures for fulfilling the demands will surely contribute in increasing the NPAs. The latest report of CRISIL indicates that banking industry will suffer with an increase of 11.5% in bad loans by March next year. This may cause uncertainty in banking industry resulting “discouragement in consumption as well as the invested corpus required for pushing quick recovery in economy.” We may have a huge surplus of money due to supply of funds to maintain the liquidity and this large corpus may remain underutilized by the households organizations and industries due the pandemic effect. How long we face the same situation in future? Only time knows, but it is astonishing whether, without demand being assessed, these policies will ever be enough, though they have some relaxing effects in short run.
This section focuses on the ontology development and its evaluation followed by key information about data collection.
4.1.
Ontology is a knowledge representation scheme
that encode knowledge in the form of classes,
relationships, properties or features or attributes,
instances or individual and axioms [
Collection of data in a structured manner is an integral phase of the ontology development process. For the development of the Covid19-IBO ontology, we collect the data from different sources (as mentioned below) according to the need of the domain. • Research articles of conferences, journals and book chapters • Existing ontology repositories/portals like Bio portal, EMBL-EBI, Agro portal • Articles on websites (As Wikipedia, blogs, different sites and so on.) • Covid-19 Databases and ontologies • Conducting interviews with expert person like doctor and general public. • Covid-19 Reports, GoI
An ontology is organized in hierarchal manner
where every entity is attached with other entities in
a parent-child relationship. Data property and object
property are the properties contained in ontology to
define the relationship between the entities. Use of
data property is to relate any individual to a
userdefined value while use of object property is to
relate the individuals belonging to any class [
Covid19-IBO stores real-world information into RDF format (Subject-Object-Predicate) that reduce the storage space as compared to other representation scheme. Figure 2 (a), (b) and (c) shows the classification of concepts, object and data properties respectively. All object and data properties have domain and range for example: Axis Bank has_open Saving Account (Object Property), PNB Bank has_status NPA(Data Property). (a)
(b) (c) Evaluation of the Covid19-IBO is very important in order to know the quality and content of the ontology. The evaluation of Covid19-IBO ontology determines that ontology is well built and comprises all essential concepts and relationships which are required for the reasoning. Evaluation approaches are categories into two group namely Verification that means Building an ontology correctly and Validation that means building the correct ontology. For the verification, we use Quantitatively (Metric based Approach) and Qualitatively (Criteria based Approach) approaches. To validate the ontology, we use competency questions. We have utilized the Pellet and Hermit reasoners (available in the protégé tool) to check the consistency of the developed Covid19-IBO.
Quantitatively: We evaluate the ontology
quantitatively by using OntoMetric tool [
The available ontologies namely an ontology for collection and analysis of Covid-19 data (CODO), Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO), and COVID-19 Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO-COVID-19) do not contain the complete information about the impact of Covid-19 on Indian banking sector. Figure 4 shows the value of different metrics of available ontologies as compared to Covid19-IBO. Although in some cases available ontologies have more matric values as compared to Covid19-IBO yet our developed ontologies are sufficient in order to provide the complete and precise information about each question which are related to the impact of Covid19 on Indian banking sector. Figure 5 depicts the number of common entities of available ontologies as compared to Covid19-IBO.
To test our approach, we have adopted subjective testing suggested by industry experts. Several important parameters namely Adoption of properties (as compared to existing ontologies), User friendly (How easily user can adopt), Future use (How ontology can be used in future viz vaccination process), Relevance of current time (Referring to the current situation of Covid-19 pandemic), Benefit of ontology, Impact on economy and Impact on society (How this ontology can be used by students, research scholars, professionals, Industry personnel etc) has been considered for the rating of this ontology by the users on the scale 1 to 10 where 1 stands for not at all satisfying these parameters and 10 for best possible satisfaction.
Thirty-nine users participated in the subjective testing by filling the google form. Among the thirty-nine users, the eighteen are female and twenty-one are male. The average age of the participant is 28.05 whereas minimum and maximum age of participants are 21 and 52 respectively. The participated users belong to different occupation like faculty, engineers, students and scholars etc. Users have also provided additional comments over the developed ontology like very useful, incorporate all the facts of the Indian economy, ontology is very much required in order to analyze the impact of Covid-19 on Indian banking sector and so on that shows accuracy and importance of Covid19-IBO ontology. The user’s results are shown by the figure 6 on the basis of the different parameters that suggested by experts.
The positive economic growth of any country reflects the financial soundness and increased purchasing power of that country. The Covid-19 pandemic destroyed the growth of the various economic activities in countries so India as well. Banking sector plays vital role in supporting the economy of the country by maintaining liquidity. In order to know the impact of Covid19 on the Indian banking sector, we have presented Covid19-IBO ontology by analyzing existing data that available in different format.
Google Form Link: http://bit.ly/3pP2h1j The developed Covid19-IBO ontology has been evaluated by three approaches namely competency questions, OntoMetric tool and OOPs pitfall scanner that shows completeness of the Covid19IBO. We have also compared the Covid19-IBO with other accessible and available ontologies of Covid19 and infer that the existing ontologies are not able to provide complete and concrete answer of the question about the Indian banking sector.
The future work of this paper is focus on the development of the widget that offer semantic services like visualization, annotation, mapping etc. We will also publish the Covid19-IBO on linked open data (LOD) for better accessibility and reusability.