Smart Environments for Cultural Heritage

This paper outlines a vision of Smart Environments for Cultural Heritage. The concept draws on research in an area variously known as Ubiquitous Computing, Pervasive Computing or Ambient Intelligence, which is recognized as one of the current grand challenges for computer science. Smart environments depend on communication and cooperation between numerous devices, sensor networks, servers in the fixed infrastructure and the increasing number of mobile devices carried by people. By adapting their behaviour to shared contextual information, applications may provide information and services tailored to their users’ immediate needs. Location is a key ingredient and many potential applications will rely on the fusion of multiple spatial models based on containment, proximity or relative positioning, as well as conventional absolute positioning. Applications in the Cultural Heritage domain range from field survey and excavation, through analysis and interpretation, conservation and preservation, to public presentation. Indeed, the domain has already proved to be a popular test bed for several experimental systems. The approach is illustrated using FieldMap, a tool designed primarily for capturing and sharing archaeological and other data in the field, but which contains components that are applicable to a wider range of CH uses. This wider applicability arises because FieldMap is an application of the MobiComp ubiquitous computing infrastructure. MobiComp has been designed to support the capture, sharing and re-use of contextual information across a wide range of mobile and networked devices.