Framework for UNESCO intangible cultural heritage

UNESCO, in its 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, obliges State Parties to inventory cultural heritage and making those inventories accessible. It allows a great flexibility to determine how the inventories should be prepared. In this paper we will present the framework for the inventorying, cataloging, searching and browsing of multimedia digital objects related to ICH (Intangible Cultural Heritage), for preservation and safeguard, that we used to design and implement the AESS (Archivio di Etnografia e Storia Sociale Lombardy Region) archive: the data concern mainly popular traditions handed down generation by generation, such as traditional fairs, popular songs, and customs. We will present for the first time the features that characterize our approach, describing the framework we developed, within a methodological approach for designing applications, pointing out the characteristic features of the data and of the online system. © 2014 Society for Imaging Science and Technology.