Preserving Ephemeral Traditions: A Chain of Custody and Semantic Storage Framework for Motion-Captured Intangible Cultural Heritage

Abstract

While the use of motion capture technology helps safeguard ephemeral intangible cultural heritage (ICH), issues arise with the integrity, authenticity, and enduring usability of digitised assets. This paper presents an expansion of the existing motion capture preservation framework which consists of pre-production, production, and post-production phases by adding a robust chain of custody based on respect des fonds. This custodial principle of respecting context, origin, and ownership is modified to document the capture, editing, storing, and disseminating lineage of ICH data. By placing metadata documenting each custodial shift alongside contextual data within cultural ecosystems, the proposed chain of custody provides referential legitimacy and traceability to the seized motion artefacts wherein such artefacts are secondary to primary reference artefacts. Moreover, these artefacts under the proposed framework would fall under a semantic preservation storage system that uses ontologies and linked data models depicting relations between elements of ICH, ICH creators, and their socio-cultural relevance, thus enhancing but not degrading data reliability. This proposed framework enables cross-disciplinary frameworks without loss of contextual accuracy and mitigates data downgrading while enhancing contextual relevance. Such an integrated approach addresses motion-captured ICH throughout its life cycle, ensuring the accuracy and integrity of digital heritage preservation while being unchanging and semantically valid for scholarly, educational, or creative use. In developing methods to preserve the authenticity and control of intangible heritage within a global memory framework that is becoming digitised, this work integrates digital preservation technologies with archival science.