Dive into Intangible Cultural Heritage!

This multimedia tool provides access to about 500 elements inscribed on UNESCO’s Lists of the 2003 Convention. It can be accessed through the website of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Using web-semantics and graphic visualization, ‘Dive into Intangible Cultural Heritage!’ explores the various elements of intangible cultural heritage across domains, themes, geographies and ecosystems. Contents are interconnected, referring to almost 1,000 concepts (such as ‘Dance’, ‘Family’, ‘Rituals’), and 15,000 relationships between elements, concepts, countries and regions, which can be visualised as networks. It was further developed and refined with support from the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

 Some of the threats to intangible cultural heritage illustrated in the visualization are:

• Conflicts and repressive policies
• Environmental degradation
• Rural-urban migration