A trustworthy multimedia participatory platform for cultural heritage management in smart city environments

Cultural heritage applications within smart city environments are becoming extremely popular to public authorities. The success of such applications lies on several factors like user-friendliness and data presentation as well as the amount and accuracy of cultural data they can offer to users, static or mobile, on-demand. This paper presents the design and implementation of a multipurpose, multidiscipline digital platform that manages, preserves and disseminates tangible and intangible cultural heritage information, in a trustworthy manner, appropriate for the everyday use in smart city digital environments. Platform's trustworthiness is mainly ensured by applying specific authorization mechanisms based on an extended role-based access control scheme. The platform integrates a mobile services module that can host and support smartphone applications for the direct collection, digitization and dissemination of cultural heritage content. Moreover, we make an attempt to address various stakeholders who benefit from such a platform. In this direction we have designed and implemented a series of real life usage scenarios. The proposed platform is evaluated against other online digital platforms that host cultural heritage content. Evaluation results suggest that the presented platform could become a participatory system that targets not only experts and artists, but also amateurs and enthusiasts of cultural heritage. This vast and heterogeneous user base could be the only feasible way to support data-hungry ecosystems like smart city digital environments, by providing cultural information at any time and place.