A Participatory Digital Platform for Cultural Heritage within Smart City Environments

Abstract

Cultural heritage applications within smart city environments are becoming extremely popular to public authorities. The success of such applications lies on several factors like user-friendliness and data presentation as well as the amount and accuracy of cultural data they can offer to users, static or mobile, on-demand. This paper presents the design and implementation of a multipurpose, multidiscipline digital platform that manages, preserves and disseminates tangible and intangible cultural heritage information, appropriate for the everyday use in smart city digital environments. The platform aims to become a participatory system that addresses not only to experts of cultural heritage and artists, but also amateurs and enthusiasts of cultural heritage. This vast and heterogeneous user base could be the only feasible way to support such data-hungry ecosystems, by providing cultural information at any time and place. The platform integrates a mobile services module that can host and support smartphone applications for the direct collection, digitization and presentation of cultural heritage content.