Vienna International Festival (wiener Festwochen) 1996 : Managing culture on the Web

Managing and maintaining a Web presence becomes non-trivial when the size of the service exceeds a certain limit. Keeping the data organization, the information mapping to Web pages, and the navigation design manageable while providing a consistent interface in terms of layout and usability are basic requirements to Web presence. Currently the tools for managing and maintaining Web presence are limited as most page editors work on small sets of pages. During the work on the Vienna International Festival Web presence of 300+ multilingual pages, we soon stepped beyond manageability with common page editors. The Vienna International Festival and the Technical University of Vienna have cooperated since the beginning of 1995 to present program and organization information of the annual festival on the Web. The service provides information on the most famous Austrian cultural event hosted every spring by theaters, concert halls and museums. We developed a methodology to organize, implement and maintain a web presence. The methodology includes scientific design and organization modeling, integration of static and interactive Web services and consistent layout management using editable Web interface templates. An object-oriented language is used to describe data organization, layout templates and presence contents in a manageable and maintainable way. A preprocessor finally transfers the data objects to the web presence. The paper presents the techniques and results that we gained by applying the methodology for the Vienna International Festival in 1996.