Documenting the ephemeral: An ontology for the performing arts

Abstract

The performing arts domain, addressing the ephemeral nature of its main study subject, the performance, calls upon Digital Humanities’ techniques to document, record and analyse the performative event, thus offering a new perspective to research and education. In this context, many digital projects have been completed, including digitising art archives, creating databases of art productions and developing metadata schemas and conceptual models. The study of these efforts revealed a need for a universal and comprehensive way of documenting performance. This article, which benefitted from the experience gained thus far in the performing arts in the digital world, attempts to unify the domain’s acquired knowledge and organise it in an ontology. While the overall success of such a project proved to be greater than the scope of this research, we propose a core ontology for the performing arts, which has the potential to evolve in the future.