Thai dance knowledge archive framework based on Labanotation represented in 3D animation

Southeast Asia is one of the most rapidly growing regions in the world with natural and cultural resources. It is important to pass on the cultural knowledge to the next generation. Intangible Cultural Heritage like traditional dances, or folk dance is a valuable cultural knowledge to be maintained and passed on by transferring tacit knowledge, and even explicit knowledge such as books, or video presentations. Issues of passing on the knowledge can be the loss of knowledge from time to time by the reduction of the number of dance masters, unreliable sources, and low quality. To retrieve such valuable knowledge, there is a widely-used tool in Europe, in the United States, Asia and Southeast Asia, called “Labanotation” which is about recording and analyzing the dance movement. This paper focuses on proposing a framework for a traditional Thai dance knowledge archive creating an ontology using knowledge engineering based on Labanotation by transferring notation scores to represent the dance in 3D Animation. The framework assists dancers, notators, knowledge engineers, software engineers to successfully communicate with each other.