An ethical data practice for intangible cultural heritage: a practical guide for collecting and linking data on immaterieelerfgoed.be
Sofie Veramme
**Intangible cultural heritage (ICH)** is very much alive: practices evolve over time and adapt to a fast-changing world. Communities, groups and individuals are the prime custodians of ICH. The existing approaches and methodologies for linking data in tangible heritage cannot be practised in the context of (meta)dating ICH.

During the project pURIs for immaterieelerfgoed.be: Building Blocks for Digital Transformation in the Cultural Heritage Sector, NGO Workshop Intangible Heritage Flandres researched how to develop a persistent and sustainable data practise for ICH. The project addressed **questions relating to the tension between the principles behind open data on the one hand, and the stewardship of communities over their living and evolving ICH on the other**. Immaterieelerfgoed.be is the platform for ICH in Flanders and Brussels. It includes inventories of ICH. The content of these inventories mainly take on the form of descriptive data and are collated through co-creation.

**To achieve an ethical data practice, the rights and well-being of the ICH community involved in all phases of the data life cycle on - and beyond - immaterieelerfgoed.be have to be prioritised**. The aim is to reduce the potential harm that data sharing may cause to the communities involved, e.g. the misuse of heritage that has customary restrictions on access and use). By building upon known principles for data sharing, combining FAIR (open and persistent data sharing) and CARE (people and purposes oriented data sharing), a methodology to map the current data practice applied on immaterieelerfgoed.be has been developed. Additionally a series of actions to establish an ethical data strategy, ensuring both clean and open data and agency and advocacy of the ICH communities, has been discerned. 

During the course of the project, we scrutinised the current registration module for the ICH inventories, applied user agreements and privacy policies and the attribution of rights statements and reuse licences (e.g. Creative Commons). We researched how we can implement persistent URI’s and install an opt-out option for them without breaking their persistence. In addition we found that it is indispensable that the communities concerned have to be sensitised about the impact of sharing their data.
legal and social responsibilities for dp from document to data