Institutional Services and Tools for Content, Metadata and IPR Management

Multimedia services need to be supported by content, metadata and workflow management systems to efficiently manage huge amount of content items and metadata production as in the case of cultural institutions. Online digital libraries and cultural heritage institutions and the other portals of publishers need an integrated multimedia back office in order to aggregate content and provide them to national and international aggregators. Different solutions need to be defined and adopted in order to efficiently organize and manage large amount of data and processes to cope with them. The aim of this paper is to formalize and discuss about requirements, design and validation of an institutional aggregator for metadata and content, coping with IPR Models for providing content towards Europeana, the European international aggregator. The first contribution presented in this article corresponds to the identification of the Content Aggregator requirements and needs, and thus the definition and realization of a distributed architecture and workflow solution satisfying them. A second contribution consists of the formalization of IPR Model and solution that allow shortening the activities of IPR resolution and avoiding the assignment of conflicting rights/permissions. The proposed solution and models have been validated and results are reported in the paper in the case of the ECLAP service. ECLAP Content Aggregator has been established by the European Commission to serve Europeana for the thematic area of Performing Arts institutions.