MEDINA Three Years Later: Towards "Enterprise Frameworks" for cultural tourism Web applications

The MEDINA project aims to promote cultural tourism in the Mediterranean basin by means of a transnational multimedia Web portal that addresses Mediterranean culture as a whole and is integrated with a federation of national Web sites, each one dealing with the local heritage of a specific Mediterranean country. A cost-effective development of the overall 'system' is made possible by a suite of tools that constitute an enterprise framework for cultural tourism. They offer a semi-complete application skeleton that can be easily adapted to produce customized Web sites in this domain. The MEDINA framework implements a 'model-based', 'end-user development' approach: built for and with domain experts (cultural tourism specialists), MEDINA provides a set of user-friendly functionalities that hide the implementation complexity and can be used by users with no technical know-how to design a Web site by remodelling, to set up a (customized) design schema with the proper multimedia contents, and to dynamically generate applications on-the-fly, as the development process proceeds.