VARIAZIONI: Collaborative Authoring of Localized Cultural Heritage Contents over the Next Generation of Mashup Web Services

This paper presents developments and results from the VARIAZIONI project, funded by the Commission of the European Union under the eContentPlus program. The project aims to develop and validate an open collaborative infrastructure and methodology for authoring, distribution and delivery of European Musical Contents. VARIAZIONI approach encompasses the development of a collaborative platform where non technical users from cultural institutions can easily catalogue their existing digital assets, comprising multimedia master classes, audio/video concerts, images, scanned documents, etc., and create new contents from the existing contents of other institutions, taking into account IPR issues. We aim to demonstrate the feasibility of reusing and integrating contents in different applications, like Websites, e-courses, collaborative portals, and new distribution channels, through the usage of friendly interfaces and intelligent techniques for reducing cataloguing effort. As a result, existing contents will be more accessible and enriched through its reuse and inclusion of internet resources.