This is a first post in a new series on VU Semantic Web reading club. During this weekly reading club we discuss a research paper related to Semantic Web, Human Computation or Computer Science in general. Every week, one group member selects and prepares a paper to discuss. This week it was my time and I chose a paper from 2013: “Dance in the World of Data and Objects” by Katerina El Raheb and Yannis Ioannidis (full citation and abstract below). The paper presents the need for (OWL) ontologies for dance representation. A quite nice slide deck supporting the paper is found here.
Computer-interpretable knowledge representations for dance is something I have been thinking about for a while now. I am mostly interested in representations that actually match the conceptual level at which dancers and choreoraphers communicate and how these are related to low-level representations such as Labanotation. I am currently supervising two Msc students on this topic.
The paper by El Raheb and Ioannidis and our discussion afterwards outlined the potential use of such a formal representations for:
- Archiving dance and for retrieval. This is a more ‘traditional’ use of such representations in ICT for Cultural Heritage. An interesting effect of having this represented using standard semantic web languages is that we can connect deep representations of choreographers to highly heterogeneous knowledge about for example dance or musical styles, locations, recordings, emotions etc. An interesting direct connection could be to Albert Merono’s RDF midi representations.
- For dance analysis. By having large amounts of data in this representation, we can support Digital Humanities research. Both in more distant reading, but potentially also more close analysis of dance. Machine learning techniques could be of use herer.
- For creative support. Potentially very interesting is to investigate to what extent representations of dance can be used to support the creative process of dancers and choreographers. We can think of pattern-based adaptations of choreographies.
Citation: El Raheb K., Ioannidis Y. (2013) Dance in the World of Data and Objects. In: Nesi P., Santucci R. (eds) Information Technologies for Performing Arts, Media Access, and Entertainment. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7990. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Abstract: In this paper, we discuss the challenges that we have faced and the solutions we have identified so far in our currently on-going effort to design and develop a Dance Information System for archiving traditional dance, one of the most significant realms of intangible cultural heritage. Our approach is based on Description Logics and aims at representing dance moves in a way that is both machine readable and human understandable to support semantic search and movement analysis. For this purpose, we are inspired by similar efforts on other cultural heritage artifacts and propose to use an ontology on dance moves (DanceOWL) that is based on the Labanotation concepts. We are thus able to represent dance movement as a synthesis of structures and sequences at different levels of conceptual abstraction, which serve the needs of different potential users, e.g., dance analysts, cultural anthropologists. We explain the rationale of this methodology, taking into account the state of the art and comparing it with similar efforts that are also in progress, outlining the similarities and differences in our respective objectives and perspectives. Finally, we describe the status of our effort and discuss the steps we intend to take next as we proceed towards the original goal.