InCulture: A Collaborative Platform for Intangible Cultural Heritage Narratives

Abstract

Intangible Culture Heritage (ICH) is defined as the collection of oral traditions and expressions such as epics, fairy tales, stories, arts, social practices, rituals and celebrations, events, knowledge, and practices related to nature and the universe, traditional medicine, folk medicine, traditional handcrafts, as well as personal experiences related to important historical events or cultural activities that shaped the historical and local identity. Under the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the ICH, nations are committed to developing inventories of ICH and working with local communities, groups, and individuals to preserve these traditions. In this paper, a platform is introduced that facilitates the collection of intangible ICH data, the formation of story-based narratives, and their presentation to the public via a web and mobile application, which offers Augmented Reality (AR) experiences. The platform aims to support the formation of user communities sharing common interests and to provide them with the appropriate tools for collecting pieces of ICH. Collected ICH resources and created narratives are modeled using semantic web technologies so that information can be perceived by third-party systems too. Furthermore, towards the dissemination of the platform, a real-world use case took place on the island of Rhodes focusing on the recent history of the island between 1912 and 1948 (WWII). The platform was implemented to support the goals of the project InCulture, funded by the EPAnEK Greek national co-funded operational program “Competitiveness Entrepreneurship and Innovation”.

Keywords

• cultural heritage
• Intangible Cultural Heritage
• web-based narratives
• web-based storytelling
• Augmented Reality
• semantic web