This article introduces a framework for creating rich augmented environments based on a social web of intelligent things and people. We target outdoor environments, aiming to transform a region into a smart environment that can share its cultural heritage with people, promoting itself and its special qualities. Using the applications developed in the framework, people can interact with things, listen to the stories that these things tell them, and make their own contributions. The things are intelligent in the sense that they aggregate information provided by users and behave in a socially active way. They can autonomously establish social relationships on the basis of their properties and their interaction with users. Hence when a user gets in touch with a thing, she is also introduced to its social network consisting of other things and of users; she can navigate this network to discover and explore the world around the thing itself. Thus the system supports serendipitous navigation in a network of things and people that evolves according to the behavior of users. An innovative interaction model was defined that allows users to interact with objects in a natural, playful way using smartphones without the need for a specially created infrastructure. The framework was instantiated into a suite of applications called WantEat, in which objects from the domain of tourism and gastronomy (such as cheese wheels or bottles of wine) are taken as testimonials of the cultural roots of a region. WantEat includes an application that allows the definition and registration of things, a mobile application that allows users to interact with things, and an application that supports stakeholders in getting feedback about the things that they have registered in the system. WantEat was developed and tested in a real-world context which involved a region and gastronomy-related items from it (such as products, shops, restaurants, and recipes), through an early evaluation with stakeholders and a final evaluation with hundreds of users.

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Abstract. This paper presents a framework and a prototype implementation of a system that integrates ontological knowledge base with the services for the users in mobility. Our system tries to help users navigate the domain of gastronomy, offering a possibility to explore the ontological base consisting of many concepts and relations. We present the logic and technical realization of the modules responsible for knowledge base interrogation and for presenting the obtained information to a user. We also provide a brief description of the implemented interface and user evaluation.

Abstract. The paper presents a framework for the selection and ranking of activities proposed to users in a social networking service, as for example Facebook's "social events". Our proposal takes into account the peculiarities of this application area, considering a variety of factors including the spatiotemporal relations between activities and between activities and users, and the social opinions weighted by the user's interest in the specific themes and type of an activity. To this aim, we describe a semantic model for the involved entities, and especially for the available activities. We describe a process that can be easily configured according to user preferences, extended to take into account additional ranking factors, and adapted to include existing recommendation/ranking strategies. Finally, we specifically introduce ranking factors that can be used within the specific model and process we describe. The results of a preliminary evaluation show the effectiveness of our approach.

In this paper we introduce the idea of interaction with networks of socially intelligent objects as a way of supporting tourists and introducing them to the culture of a territory and as a way of maintaing the cultural heritage of a territory alive. We illustrate this idea with an application we designed in the field of gastronomy. Socially intelligent objects are able to maintain and aggregate knowledge about themselves and their world and are able to establish social relations with other objects and people. In this way they become hubs which allow tourists to get in touch with the world of the objects which is made of a territory, its culture and traditions, people and other objects. We support natural forms of interaction without requiring any electronic infrastructring of the objects. In particular, we designed an interaction paradigm supporting a playful enhancing experience when interacting with objects. We also support a continuum of experience in the real and virtual world