From Collective Memory to Map Services

Abstract

The route followed by a refugees’ group towards its destination can, in many cases, be regarded as the reference point around which the collective memory of such a group of people is intertwined. Such a route enriches people's memories with common experiences, targeting places and interactions among refugees and locals and may affect the collective memory of such people positively or negatively. A crucial point in the modern paradigm of smart cities is the quality of life. To achieve quality of life for its citizens a smart city should establish ways to reduce alienation among the different groups that constitute the city's palimpsest. Understanding the different cultural identities and improvement of social cohesion between different people groups is one of the basic vehicles towards this goal. In this paper, we attempt to give a first answer to such problems proposing and implementing specific services in the context of a crowdsourcing system for collective memory management using interactive maps. We demonstrate a basic usage scenario to show the strength of the implemented services, along with a two-step evaluation showing positive results.