Inventorying Intangible Cultural Heritage on the Web: a Life-cycle Approach

According to the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of UNESCO, creating inventories and making them accessible is a specific obligation for the States Parties. These activities are complex and require methodological tools to integrate the different backgrounds, competencies and skills needed to succeed. In this paper we will present a framework for the complete management of multimedia information systems related to Intangible Cultural Heritage, that we applied to the design and implementation of the Ethnography and Social History Archive of the Lombardy Region in Italy. We describe the characteristics that distinguish our unified approach, within a broader context of the methodological design of web applications, emphasising the innovative features of the online systems developed. We present the environments for managing, searching and browsing ICH data, with a final comparison.