Variazioni

The project VARIAZIONI has the goal of improving Musical Metadata Tagging through:

• the definition of a Common European Musical Metadata and
• a Collaborative Tagging and Enrichment Process based on Tools that combine automatic and manual tagging.

One of the most innovative aspects of VARIAZIONI is that is based on communities. Internet has shown the power of communities. The experiences of the Fundación Albéniz over the last few years have demonstrated the need to create portals in which protagonist is transferred to the users, whose participation becomes the key to success in the creation of active communities that maintain and create the contents. In VARIAZIONI, the process on enrichment is based on adding new metadata in the process of reusing (adapting) contents for new contexts or even customising content metadata by a user.

The project VARIAZIONI will setup a collaborative portal, VARIAZIONI content enrichment portal, where users can contribute to the creation, enrichment and cataloguing of musical contents.

VARIAZIONI content enrichment portal aims to develop and validate an open infrastructure and methodology for distribution and delivery of European regional cultural content, mainly based on music content. The project will provide a paradigm shift in how the content is created, transformed, adapted and consumed, by adopting an architecture of participation and involving users from the very early stage of content creation, classification and transformation.

The project is built on top of a wealth of relevant results of previously research activities in European R&D Programs (MUSICNETWORK, WEDELMUSIC, SIMAC), eContent projects such as HARMOS and in particular on the ongoing project AXMEDIS based on a technology platform, with DRM support and tools for production, protection and distribution of content.

Using the results and expertise of all these European projects, VARIAZIONI has the main goal of improving Musical Metadata Tagging and its quality, through the promotion of the reuse and enrichment of existing musical digital assets in new applications and new distribution channels.

The main issue of the HARMOS project was the preservation of educational contents from the great European maestros thought the recording in audiovisual format of their classes. The necessity to work with the audiovisual archives of the participating institutions made us aware both of the value of the materials that all of these institution have in their archives and of the difficulty to undertake common projects due the high variety of formats, cataloguing tools and even preservations conditions. The work developed by MUSICNETWORK or WEDELMUSIC projects showed the importance of this cultural heritage. The huge dimension of the work ahead made relevant the need of a new project in order to preserve and make accessible this cultural content in a very usable way through the definition and application of a Common European Musical Metadata.

The main objectives of the project are the following:

• O1. Define a common metadata for European Musical Digital assets
• O2. Automatic enrichment of contents with available Mashup web services and automatic tagging systems
• O3. Provide a community driven open infrastructure for content enrichment, re-use and secure distribution
• O4. Provide a content enrichment portal and rights model for sustainability of content enrichment
• O5. Leverage user participation to enrich content and content metadata
• O6. Promote the development of user communities for continuous enrichment of contents
• O7. Continuous improvement of contents and services through user behaviour real-time monitoring