The digital opera house: an architecture for multimedia databases

This paper deals with the problem of preserving, organizing and retrieving information for a typical opera house environment. On the one hand, the live fruition of a music work in a theatre is an experience very difficult to be recreated in a different context or handed down to posterity; but, on the other hand, opera houses are important centers for cultural preservation and diffusion, and their work cannot get lost immediately after performances. The processes in such an environment are very heterogeneous and complex, including not only the economic management and the logistic activities which take place in the offices, but also on-stage artistic production and craft-made activities in workshops. Probably, these latter activities are the most interesting from the point of view of cultural heritage. This paper provides a classification of the heterogeneous data to put in relationship in order to obtain a thorough and effective database. The ultimate purpose is highlighting which information should be captured, structured, and retrieved in order to transform musical performances in cultural heritage for posterity.