Composition of situational interactive spaces by end users: a case for cultural heritage

An emerging need to make software systems flexible to increase their ability to support a large variety of tasks is highlighted in recent works published in the literature. The idea is to replace fixed, pre-packaged applications with elastic composition environments that, thanks to a separation among data, functions and presentations, make interactive environments "emerge" at run-time based on composition actions performed by end users. In this paper we address this need and propose a reference architecture, based on mashup technologies, that allows the end users, not necessarily experts of technologies, to extract contents from heterogeneous sources and compose Personal Information Spaces (PISs) that satisfy their situational information needs and that can be pervasively executed on different devices. The flexibility that this architecture can offer is beneficial in several application domains and it is here demonstrated for a specific context in Cultural Heritage (CH). A prototype supporting the creation and use of PISs has been developed. The results of a formative evaluation session, in which we observed real users (e.g., guides of an archeological park) using the prototype, are also reported. They provide indications of some drawbacks that have to be overcome in order to make composition technologies an actual tool for end users.