Preservation of interactive multimedia performances

Preservation of Interactive Multimedia Performances (IMPs) is becoming important, as they are getting more and more popular in the performing arts communities. Preservation requires keeping not only all the necessary components for the production of a performance but also the knowledge about these components so that the original production process can be repeated at any given time. Ontologies provide the means for semantic processing, cataloguing and querying on preserved digital objects. In this paper, a framework for digital preservation of IMPs is introduced. The framework is based on the use of ontologies for describing the complex relationships among different components of a performance to support its preservation.