A design framework for Smart Cultural Objects

Abstract

Nowadays cities, as well as Cultural Heritage, are facing new challenges due to the public fi nancial straits and the increasing need to deliver innovative service to manage a wide heritage. Great expectations are in put the Smart City paradigm relying on the capability of the city to realize and scale up intangible infrastructures based on new typologies of partnerships for the development of services. The paper presents a design framework aimed to transform Cultural Items in Smart Cultural Objects (SCO), meant as sources and recipients of advanced information applied on 'Widespread Built Cultural Heritage'. The aim has been not just to enhance the artifacts with their own quality, but their unique social, communal, anthropological and urban-infrastructural meaning. The ability to manage effi ciently heterogeneous data and the levels of global connectivity, as well as the real-time interaction, perception, localization, communication, and identifi cation, made possible by cloud computing and Internet of Things, to allow the changeover from Cultural Objects to SCO. The framework, here exposed, aims to provide an extensive and robust theoretical support to design and to manage the processes of Cultural Objects and Cultural bins, implementing a methodological system and an advanced environment based on ICT technologies for recording, storage, processing, access and presentation of Cultural Heritage (CH) data in a Smart Management environment. The framework has been applied in two projects for a prototypical case study of widespread urban CH.

The IoT as a Key in the Sensitive Balance between Development Needs and Sustainable Conservation of Cultural Resources in Italian Heritage Cities

“…Although the storing, processing and interoperability of data are currently the focus of a large part of research efforts in general urban-scale IoT systems, the application to whole urban heritages has its own peculiar barriers. In particular, Gaiani et al [120] underline a total lack of accessibility to specialized information with a prevailing fragmentation of processes.…”

Managing Cultural Heritage With Integrated Services Platform

“…The digitisation extended to the entire process, hoped for many years, or novel and powerful Information Systems based on reality-based 3D models as replicas of the original artefact with complete chromatic, graphic and metric features, are in fact no longer sufficient looking ahead. Besides further tools not yet implemented in recent web-based IS, that may be subject to future developments with a view to completing all the user tools made available for the service, it is still weak, e.g., the reception of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm to create a model of global knowledge linking the electronic to the physical world, easily shareable to any user and with the aim to transform Cultural Items into Smart Cultural Objects (SCO), sources and recipients of advanced information capable of taking an active role in information (Gaiani et al, 2015b). This information framework enabled by IoT with tagged links could provide a means for efficiently collecting, generating and sharing knowledge between various service stakeholders, public (citizens and tourists) and private (managers and institutions), and become a fully integrated system containing sensing, storage, analytics and interpretation data (Gaiani, 2017).…”