CHEF: A user centered perspective for cultural heritage enterprise frameworks

An enterprise framework denotes a "reusable, "semi-complete" application skeleton that can be easily adapted to produce custom applications in a specific business domain. CHEF is an enterprise framework for multi-device hypermedia applications in cultural heritage. Its goal is to reduce the cost of application development and to improve the quality of the final product. Differently from existing frameworks, which are typically conceived as tools for programmers, CHEF adopts an end-user development approach. It has been built for and with "domain experts" (cultural heritage specialists). It provides a set of user-friendly tools that hide the implementation complexity and can be used, by domain experts with no technical know-how, to design-by-reuse their hypermedia, to instantiate their designs with the proper contents, and to deliver the final application on different platforms (web-enabled desktop, PDA, CD-ROM).