A TECHNOLOGICAL INFRASTRUCTURE FOR CULTURAL TOURISM

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1 Abstract A TECHNOLOGICAL INFRASTRUCTURE FOR CULTURAL TOURISM L. Bordoni 1 Cultural assets are an expression of a country s artistic and historical heritage, and are custodians of its identity. This heritage includes material and immaterial assets that, through their connection with a community s history, art, and culture in general, bear witness to its customs, and above all to its spiritual roots. Art and culture as the expression of a people s diversity are inscribed in the complex history of civilizations. Cultural assets make it possible to rediscover the common traits that facilitate contacts between populations and the development of the international community. Our aim is to contribute to cultural tourism through the creation of networks disseminating information on the availability of artistic objects and manifestations and making them known to the general public. For this purpose semantic web technologies are proposed for application to diversified information sources that may be referred to two major areas of cultural tourism interest: services (transport, hospitality, etc.) and culture (history, art, traditions, etc.). Keywords Cultural tourism, ontology, semantic web, social media, webgis Introduction Culture and tourism are two closely-interrelated concepts. One propels the other and a combination of both covers a wide range of activities taking place daily in most places round the globe. Cultural tourism is one of the most dynamic phenomena of the modern world, it may be defined as the movement of individuals towards cultural-type attractions; different types of cultural tourists may be identified, and different classifications have been proposed. Attracting cultural tourists has become a common strategy for countries and regions seeking to conserve traditional cultures, to develop new cultural resources [1]. Recently cultural tourism has acquired enormous rates of growth and scales of influence on the level of development of the world community as a whole, and in many countries it has become one of the key branches of economics. Development of cultural tourism is one of the priorities of the 21-st century. According to the World tourist organization, in 10 years the number of tourists will be doubled and the number of people, travelling from one state to another, will be over 1 billion, and by billion [2]. Cultural tourism is an important economic item also for Italy as industry statistics and surveys show and it offers an enormous market. Cultural tourists are increasingly engaged in a search for new knowledge and experiences. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are becoming one of the most important information tools in the 21st century. Their impact affects the lifestyle, the way of learning and working of the people, as well as the way in which institutions interact with society. ICT enables tourists and visitors to familiarise themselves with the culture of destinations around the globe. 1 ENEA, Technical Unit for ICT, luciana.bordoni@enea.it 1

2 Since the beginning of the 2000s, Semantic Web technologies and their potentials for the integration and exploitation of digital cultural heritage information have received increasing attention, and today they represent an exciting and dynamic field of interdisciplinary research. It is a common opinion that the diversity and richness of cultural heritage provides an excellent field for the deployment and experimentation of Semantic Web-based systems. Managing and using multimedia metadata to facilitate access to cultural objects has always been of particular importance for memory institutions. The aim of this paper is to describe the characteristics of the cultural tourism as well as the challenges related to the tourism electronic marketplace and to discuss how semantic web technologies can help to resolve these challenges. For this purpose, semantic web technologies are proposed for application to diversified information sources that may be referred to two major areas of cultural tourism interest: services (transport, hospitality, etc.) and culture (history, art, traditions, etc.). The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 introduces cultural tourism in the context of semantic web technologies. Section 3 presents a case study (which is related to the territory of Lazio in Italy) and section 4 provides conclusions and future works. 2. Cultural tourism and semantic web technologies Cultural tourism is not new, since ancient times it has been a motivation for travel, although only among a tiny minority of the general public. The Grand Tour was once considered an essential part of a gentleman s education. Today, it is a worldwide mass trend that people travel to experience other cultures. But it is only since the early 1980s that cultural tourism has been recognized as distinct from recreational tourism. Europe is the world s top tourist destination and cultural and heritage tourism is a central dimension. Typical culture tourism in Europe includes festivals and events, banquets, music, theatre, shows, village and rural life (e.g. farms, Sunday markets), gastronomy, visiting/tasting local products, general sightseeing, village buildings and atmosphere, visiting historic and religious monuments or vernacular buildings and ruins, and famous people in the region. Cultural and heritage tourism has become a major source of revenue for many communities and states across the globe. Not only does it create jobs, but it has the potential of bringing in needed revenue from outside the community and stimulating the local economy beyond the capacity of its own residents. There are many conditions and resources that are needed for success. One of the most essential components is the coordination of all aspects of travel and development and in this context information plays an important role. A trip usually includes many parts such accommodation, transportation, insurance, visa services, guide services, excursions in the destination. Due to the heterogeneity of the travel product, travel agency consultant or a person who is planning the trip itself must have access to different sources of information. As the Web has changed people s daily life, it has significantly influenced the way of information gathering and exchanging in the area of tourism. Information technology starts to play a challenging role in the domain of tourism, such as Semantic Web and Web2.0. In tourism domain, there already exist different in-house taxonomies and catalogues which are designed and used internally by tourism agents to help them to manage heterogeneous tourism data. Efforts are made to generate global standards to facilitate inter and intra tourism data exchange (e.g., by the World Tourism Organization). 2

3 Mediation, ontologies and semantic web can be considered as pieces of a puzzle, which can create an image of a future harmonised electronic tourism environment. The aim is to allow information systems to cooperate without the need to modify their software or their data organization. Ontologies play an important role to facilitate semantic integration of heterogeneous data [3]. They can assist organisation, browsing, searching, and more intelligent access to information and services available online [4]; for this reason several publicly available formal tourism ontologies have been created [5]. Since the beginning of the 2000s, Semantic Web technologies and their potentials for the integration and exploitation of digital cultural heritage information have received increasing attention, and today they represent an exciting and dynamic field of interdisciplinary research. It is a common opinion that the diversity and richness of cultural heritage provides an excellent field for the deployment and experimentation of Semantic Web-based systems. Managing and using multimedia metadata to facilitate access to cultural objects has always been of particular importance for memory institutions. CultureSampo ( is an ambitious system for creating a collective semantic memory of the cultural heritage of a nation on the Semantic Web 2.0, combining ideas underlying the Semantic Web and the Web 2.0. The system addresses the semantic Web challenge of aggregating highly heterogeneous, cross-domain cultural heritage collections and other contents into a semantically rich intelligent system for human and machine users. Another interesting application is MANTIC [6] a Web application that realizes a portal for archaeological information concerning the city of Milan. It provides browsing and navigation functionalities on a semantic repository integrating legacy information sources (a Web portal and existing relational databases). 3. ENEATOUR: a case study Many little-known areas have interesting heritages to be capitalized on, promoted, and rendered useable by and attractive to the broader public. The territory of Lazio, in particular, offers considerable development opportunities with the creation, for example, of appropriate infrastructures that do not simply connect the centre with the outskirts, but are vehicles for the region s deeper economic and cultural integration. The object examined in this case study is the area of Latium south of the Tiber, where Latin civilization was born and developed, the setting of the last six books of Virgil s Aeneid, which sing of Rome s origins, with Aeneas s landing in ancient Lavinium (present-day Pratica di Mare in Pomezia). Still little known and visited, as confirmed by statistics, and partially included in parks and natural reserves, this area possesses a vast archaeological, artistic, ethnographic, natural, historic, and scientific heritage. It is represented in many kinds of manifestations and carried by a big variety of information: primary documents, digital copies, web sites, etc. It has been studied, analysed, protected by different actors throughout the history (people and institutions), each of them documenting their actions and knowledge in all kinds of records, monographs, articles, legal texts, collections, etc. This knowledge comes from different sources (encyclopaedias, reference books, finding aids, government publications, databases, web sites, etc.) that can be accessed only in a fragmented way, without any or with a weak interconnection. 3

4 Besides that they are in different stages of formalisation, standardisation or, even, digitisation. All of the above made very difficult to access this information. This case study must make it possible to: 1) capitalize on this territory of Latium, emphasizing its singular nature and great merit; 2) facilitate the visit by providing the user with all necessary and useful services; 3) permit cultural enrichment through easy learning and full understanding of the place s historical, artistic, and cultural issues. For this purpose, semantic web technologies are proposed for application to diversified information sources that may be referred to two major areas of cultural tourism interest: services (transport, hospitality, etc.) and culture (history, art, traditions, etc.). As regards information on services, a network will be developed for access to the sources made available by the suppliers of said services (transport companies, pro loco associations, etc.), while cultural information will be structured, and put on line. The portal ( is the main step of this application and is conceived to offer easy access to all the contents gathered. Once the ontology schema will be defined the main challenge will be the process of populating the ontology. It should be aimed both to specialised users looking for a concrete piece of information, and to general users, that just want to spend a while navigating without a particular objective. For this case study two application scenarios have been elaborated. A static scenario permits cultural enrichment through easy learning and full understanding of the place s historical, artistic, and cultural issues. For this purpose, semantic web technologies are used for application to diversified information sources. A dynamic scenario, through the use of WebGIS technologies and social media, allows virtual tourists to exchange opinions and experiences on itineraries in the Latin origins of ancient Rome. 4. Conclusions and future works The combination between tangible and intangible heritage represents the richness of a specific place and have to be preserved and promoted in order to improve the benefits for the destination and its customers tourist, citizens and businesses, in a general perspective of sustaining multiple cultural identities. In this aspect, a more comprehensive approach needs to be developed in order to appreciate heritage as a source of cultural identity and diversity, while taking into account the existing interaction between the tangible and intangible heritage of the place. Towards this objective, cities and tourism destinations need intelligent environments that are able to manage, integrate and harmonise their cultural heritage knowledge in order to organize distributed and diverse public information on cultural destinations and sites via existing and new e-services. Cultural tourism is a promising application domain for semantic web technologies that offer a significant potential for better cross-system integration. In this paper, we presented some early stage work of ENEATOUR. The website will also be exploited using such mobile devices as 3G cell phones and PDAs. The website will be designed for connection with outside systems that can provide updated information on such tourism services as transport, overnight stays, opening hours of archaeological and museum sites, and any other information useful for planning and organizing a tourism path. 4

5 The mobile platform will feature web page optimization to make its navigation easy and intuitive, as well as integration with the GPS for information access based on the user s position. Moreover, new integrated and user-specific interfaces (folksonomy) are necessary to preserve and promote the diverse but dispersed and heterogeneous cultural heritage contents. Yet, achieving this requires further research not only from a technical point of view but with regard to the users preferences and cultural heritage interpretation as well as their participation and involvement in the development of integrated ICT systems of tourism. References 1. OECD, The Impact of Culture on Tourism, OECD, Paris, UNESCO, Towards Knowledge Societies, UNESCO, Paris, T.R. Gruber, A translation approach to portable ontologies, Knowledge Acquisition, vol. 5, no.2, pp , W. Vongdoiwang Siricharoen, Enhancing semantic web and ontologies for e-tourism, International Journal of Intelligent Information and Database Systems, vol. 4, no. 4, pp , K. Prantner, Y. Ding, M. Luger, Z. Yan, C, Herzog, Tourism ontology and semantic management system: state of the art analysis, IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2007, pp G. Mantegari, M. Palmonari, G. Vizzari, Rapid Prototyping a Semantic Web Application for Cultural Heritage: The Case of MANTIC. ESWC (2) 2010, pp