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Scenarios

Today ways of presenting to the general public archaeological sites severely limits the possibility of fully understanding the cultural heritage they represent. Main problems are:

  • Subsequent periods of inhabitation by different populations. As a consequence what it is possible to see is or a selection among different layers or an exposition of one specific layer. In the former case the appearance of the site to the public can be different to the appearance to previous inhabitants while in the latter it does not give any clue about the presence of other civilisations in other historical periods.
  • Archaeological sites do not communicate each other. As a consequence it is impossible for the visitors to understand commonality and differences in the development of a global EU culture.
  • Findings excavated from a site are typically stored in archaeological museums. As a consequence the sites is a set of ruins (foundations, floors, walls, etc.), whose meaning and relevance are difficult to understand without properly relating them during their visit to what was inside (pottery, working tools, etc.)

Small brochures delivered to visitors at site entrance, drawings, posters located close to the most important parts of the site do not solve the problem; the extremely heterogeneous population of visitors implies synthetic and standardised explanations that do not take into account the cultural background, educational level, specific interests, etc. of individual visitors

Objectives

In the above context, the key strategic goals of PAST are: :

  • To revitalise archaeological sites, especially smaller ones, by making visits significantly more attractive and enjoyable, leveraging upon an approach which is information-intensive, active, interactive (two-ways), personalised, reactive and dynamic.
  • To dramatically enhance the ability of visitors to understand the cultural heritage a site represent, by taking an enlarged perspective, beyond the boundaries of space and time
  • To capitalise on previous investments and efforts made in digital preservation of cultural heritage and on existing multimedia archaeological databases, by providing techniques and tools to enable distributed, remote access and effective fruition of their content by visitors of archaeological sites.
Past Solution

To this aim, the PAST project has designed and developed an advanced ICT infrastructure (the PAST system) which exploits a number of key technologies, among which, in particular: handheld PCs, wireless networks, dynamic user profiling techniques, dynamic scheduling and planning techniques, XML technologies. At this stage the system is under test and validatation in 3 pilot installations.

In the new PAST scenario a person entering an archaeological site receives an Handheld PC (connected via wireless network a PAST Server at the site headquarter). The toursit will use the Palmtop all the visit long. He will register himself in to the system providing few personal information about himself, his interests, the time available for the visit, etc. The PAST system, based upon such few data, is able to profile the visitor and to organise a personalised plan for the visit. PAST is able to guide him across the site, pointing him out specific items (e.g., a building, a ruin, etc.) and delivering via the handheld PC context-specific, relevant information (such as photographs, drawings, movies, text, etc. from an XML native database). Besides the amount of information, the level of details and the way of presenting them is not fixed, but rather different for different visitors, based upon system knowledge of the visitor's profile.

To create the above PAST system, the project has also designed, developed, tested and validated an underlying PAST Methodology Framework, which account for 3 main areas:

  • A set of PAST-related attributes to classify and describe the content of an archaeological database and of an archaeological site, which together define the data model (technically, the XML-Schema) of the PAST Archaeological Repository.
  • A set of PAST-related attributes to classify and profile visitors of archaeological sites.
  • A set of criteria and rules to dynamically create archaeologically-sound relationships (e.g. time- and space-related) between archaeological sites and between information items in the PAST Archaeological Repository, and to dynamically generate context-sensitive and personalised visit schedules and presentations

The above described PAST scenario is modular and scaleable, easily replicable across a number of connected "nodes" (archaeological sites and museums), whose number can grow over the time. Any newly connected site will need to install an instance of PAST and to integrate it with legacy multimedia databases. PAST will self-configure itself, making local data and information globally accessible to any museum and/or site connected, via the PAST Archaeological Repository.

Last Update August 2002