Modeling abstractions for dance digital libraries

The description of the human body and its movement is fundamental and a critical part of the content of a Dance Digital Library. It must be captured in an organized way, both for allowing user interaction (browse, search) and computational analysis (similarity comparison) of dances, as well as for exploring meaningful ways to present content to users. In this paper, we present a comprehensive modeling abstraction for such digital libraries, which consists of a multi-layered model that covers different levels for describing dance movement. We address the semantic challenge of organizing knowledge of dance by starting from defining a dance piece or work, going to the characterization of its structural movement components and their related concepts and standard detailed movement description and notation i.e., Labanotation. In addition, we take into account the existing chorological research, as well as, related work in other domains, such as music information systems and standards i.e., IEEE 1599 and generic cultural heritage models i.e., FRBRoo. These modeling abstractions have been devised in the context of a more general on-going effort to develop a Dance Digital Library System and will be instrumental in some critical functionality, i.e., searching by movement concepts and characteristics in a meaningful way for a wide range of users, and linking different manifestations of movement recordings, descriptions, prescriptions or representations.