The first developmental phase of the Online Chopin Variorum Edition (OCVE) was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation from November 2005 to September 2009. It followed on from an eighteen-month pilot study also funded by Mellon from May 2003 to October 2004. OCVE's principal aim was to facilitate and enhance comparative analyses of disparate types of source material, attaining a level of manipulability outstripping that manifested in extant printed editions of Chopin's music and indeed of any composer to date. The research exploited emerging technical capacities for text/image comparison as well as recent musicological advances in cognate projects such as Chopin's First Editions Online, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council from March 2004 to February 2007, and the Annotated Catalogue of Chopin's First Editions (Cambridge University Press, 2010). The latest phase was concerned in particular with extension of OCVE's content, and with building the technical tools and frameworks for the display and manipulation of that content. The end result is an altogether new type of 'dynamic edition'. Users themselves construct a unique 'edition' of their own, combining elements from the source materials with reference to the scholarly apparatus that is provided. In addition, there is a tool for adding personal annotations and thus for creating highly flexible 'critical commentaries' of one's own.

OCVE was directed by Professor John Rink (formerly at Royal Holloway, University of London; now at the University of Cambridge) with advisory input from Professor Marilyn Deegan and Mr Simon Tanner (King's College London). OCVE employed two Research Fellows – Dr Christophe Grabowski and Dr Julia Craig-McFeely (Royal Holloway, University of London). The technical development was carried out by Elliott Hall and Paul Vetch at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH, King's College London) under the direction of John Bradley and Paul Vetch.