Dance is an integral part of any culture. Through its choreography and costumes dance imparts richness and uniqueness to that culture. Over the last decade, technological developments have been exploited to record, curate, remediate, provide access, preserve and protect tangible CH. However, intangible assets, such as dance, has largely been excluded from this previous work.

UNESCO states in its 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) that ICH is a mainspring of humanity's cultural diversity and its maintenance is a guarantee for continuing creativity. However, modern factors such as globalization and the massive movement of people have diminished the unique culture of many communities, and indeed there is a now a very real risk that many types of ICH may disappear forever. Recent computing advances have enabled the accurate 3D digitization of human motion. Such systems provide a new means for capturing, preserving and subsequently re-creating ICH which goes far beyond traditional written or imaging approaches. However, 3D motion data is expensive to create and maintain, encompassed semantic information is difficult to extract and formulate, and current software tools to search and visualize this data are too complex for most end-users.

SCHEDAR will provide novel solutions to the three key challenges of archiving, re-using and re-purposing, and ultimately disseminating ICH motion data. In addition, we will devise a comprehensive set of new guidelines, a framework and software tools for leveraging existing ICH motion databases. Data acquisition will be undertaken holistically; encompassing