Authoring Tools for Archaeological Mobile Guides

Abstract

Mobile tourist guides are increasingly useful once the visitors are in the archaeological sites. They are capable of providing huge amount of information about the sites. As it is easily understood, the selection of such information is a task that must be conducted by cultural institutions. Therefore, this paper aims at simplifying the provision of useful multimedia information in a user-friendly and attractive way. In order to achieve this goal, an authoring tool for non-expert users has been implemented, so that they will be able to contribute to mobile guides independently from the structure and the type and formats of the contents that will be added. The tool includes the possibility of defining several layers to provide the information with a split architecture, so that the creator of the guide can decide which contents to include and the languages in which the guide will be provided. This tool has been validated in several archaeological sites in order to build interactive multilingual mobile guides based on the J2ME standard.