WhoLoDancE: Deliverable 3.1 - Report on semantic representation models

This deliverable serves to summarize the semantic representation models that have been developed in the context of WhoLoDancE for organizing the various concepts related to movement, needed for the Learning experiences to be developed during the project. In this document, we mainly focus on the concepts that describe the movement itself.

Section 1 introduces the report and lists its objectives whereas Section 2 refers to the methodology employed and the movement principles defined as its first conclusions. Taking into account the diversity and heterogeneity of dance teaching and learning across genres and contexts, as well as the fact that WhoLoDancE deals with four completely different dance genres, Ballet, Contemporary, Greek Folk, and Flamenco, finding a balance between a generic framework while respecting the characteristics and needs of each dance genre, was a key challenge. Towards this direction, the consortium agreed on focusing on ten basic Movement Principles, which reflect the basic "chapters" of dance teaching or learning objectives to develop sensorimotor skills that are important in all kinds of dance independent of the genre.

Section 3 provides an overview of existing approaches for representing movement in the field of dance whereas Section 4 introduces Wholontology, an ontology which essentially models the description of movement, with focus on dance movement. The primary objective of Wholontology is to provide a knowledge base that can be utilized in various tasks, in the context of the WhoLoDancE project, such as annotation of dance recordings, high-level features extraction, similarity search and searching and browsing the library. Section 4 concludes the paper with the deployment plans for the ontology and its use within the WhoLoDancE framework.