Configurable Editorial Evironments for Cultural Heritage: The SIBECS Project

Cultural Heritage is becoming a greater attraction factor for tourism worldwide and many countries are aiming at offering lower-cost, but higher-quality, content and services that can provide better visibility to their museums, sites and landscapes. A 'traditional' Web application for cultural heritage is intended for use in a stationary setting, far away (or at least separated) from the space where the real resources are located and can be physically perceived by visitors. Mobile technology enables the creation of challenging cultural heritages applications that support new on-site experiences for the public and simultaneously expose users to both physical resources (e.g., ruins in an archaeological park, paintings in a museum or rooms in a castle) and virtual digital ones. In recent years international workgroups have proposed standards and developed tools to support the mobile tourism field (i.e. Portal Tourism Salamanca, Spain Tourism, Talking Guides, History Unwired, etc.). In our opinion these tools, well defined from the theoretical point of view and very effective in terms of results, are often independent experiences, characterized from a low degree of flexibility in terms of openness to different information sources and to new fruition devices. This paper introduces an innovative architecture designed to solve the highlighted problems. The solution is the main result of the SIBECS project (sibecsproject.unile.it). The SIBECS project was born to satisfy the cultural tourist’s need of being supported with high quality contents in all the phases of his journey (from the planning activities at home, to the on-site experiences), but also offers to the teams involved in the editorial process an integrated framework to manage all the specialized information coming from the academic/archeological world. The context of the project is the exploitation and the fruition of the Salento’s Cultural Heritages. The proposed framework is composed by: • an Editorial Environment that supports the knowledge management in different ways allowing the authors/publishers to create/aggregate contents (e.g. points of interest, itineraries) starting from existing external data sources. It is based on a layered architecture that extends and customizes the typical Data Warehouse architecture to the Cultural Heritage field, defined as the “cultural heritage warehouse” (CHW). Extraction, translation and loading (ETL) techniques have been used to integrate external data sources (knowledge databases). • a Content Delivery Environment on different channels and in different terms. It is based on a methodological approach that universalizes the Cultural Heritage’s fruition services identifying a ‘model language’ and a ‘generator’ that translates the contents for a modular multi-channel architecture. Contents are delivered through various channels: Web, PDA, Instant Multimedia (iPod and iPhone) and 3d collaborative channels. The main features of this approach include: a more flexible architecture (like the Model Driven Architecture), a better information management, a quality contents production process, a standard channel management, scalability when new channels are added. Finally the results of an early experimentation of the framework are presented.