Ontology and Semantic Wiki for an Intangible Cultural Heritage Inventory

The increasing globalization has made the preservation of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) an urgent need, and the UNESCO's states parties have compromised to make collaborative inventories of ICH. Many traditional inventories become obsolete quickly because they present rigid data models and/or because data adquisition from scarce specialists are required. This article proposes to introduce a participative inventory as a semantic wiki, combining the familiarity of the audience with the free text, the expressive power of ontologies, and the benefits of wikis for the controled social enrichment. The scope has been validated in a pilot inventory with public access, that combine an Ontowiki instance, a new ontology based on UNESCO's clasification, and the data of an existent Chilean ICH inventory. Preliminary results indicate that the semantic-based catalog is much more flexible than existing traditional catalogs. Using these collaborative enrichment will enable active involvement to citizenship in recording their immaterial heritage.