Cultural heritage storytelling, engagement and management in the era of Big Data and the semantic web / Charalampos Dimoulas

Cultural heritage (CH) refers to a highly multidisciplinary research and application field, intending to collect, archive, and disseminate traditions, monuments/artworks, and overall civilization legacies that have been preserved throughout the years of humankind. This effort is considered very important for historical and educational purposes, which can be deployed in schooling and training sessions, in science and social/humanistic studies, in artistic expression, and in everyday entertaining environments. Today’s digital media landscape offers innumerous ways for expediting the above processes at both ends, i.e., CH content production and “consumption”, taking advantage of the contemporary networking utilities with the associated augmented interaction capabilities. For instance, many museums and other art/cultural organizations are invested in the development of featured digital applications with appealing storytelling and their online dissemination to engage the audience in featured CH projects. Likewise, the proliferation of mobile devices and services and the vast expansion of so-called user-generated content (UGC) have fueled the digitization of personal CH artifacts and their progressive organizations in larger-scale databases. A typical example in that direction is the Europeana project, which formed specific media archiving and metadata standardization rules for CH institutions and sole users to follow. At the same time, urgent needs for better documentation and management of CH documents have emerged, making it difficult for the average user to be part of such large-scale undertakings. Editeur