=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2091/paper4
|storemode=property
|title=Culturaturismo.piemonte: Coordinating Cultural and Touristic Operators via the Georeferenced Civic Social Network FirstLife
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2091/paper4.pdf
|volume=Vol-2091
|authors=Guido Boella,Luigi Sanasi,Claudio Schifanella,Cristina Viano
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/avi/BoellaSSV18
}}
==Culturaturismo.piemonte: Coordinating Cultural and Touristic Operators via the Georeferenced Civic Social Network FirstLife==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2091/paper4.pdf
Culturaturismo.piemonte: Coordinating Cultural and Touristic
Operators via the Georeferenced Civic Social Network FirstLife
Guido Boella Luigi Sanasi Claudio Schifanella Cristina Viano
Department of Computer Department of Computer Department of Computer Department of Computer
Science, University of Turin Science, University of Turin Science, University of Turin Science, University of Turin
Torino, Italy Torino, Italy Torino, Italy Torino, Italy
gboella@unito.it lsanasi@gmail.com schi@di.unito.it viano@di.unito.it
ABSTRACT way to create, visualize, share and follow geo-referred contents.
"FirstLife" is an innovative example of ICT and information visual- As such, it is being tested as a tool to enhance the management
ization technology that can be used as a tool for the organization and experience of cultural heritage on the side of both cultural
and co-production of CH related available information in a spe- institutions and professionals and citizens.
cific territory. FirstLife is a map-based civic social network that
offers a geo-referenced representation of open and crowdsourced
data through an interactive map and that enable communities to
2 FIRSTLIFE: A CIVIC SOCIAL NETWORK
collaborate in creating dynamic and public contents related to the FirstLife (http://www.firstlife.org/en) is a platform for Computer
area. It overcomes some of the major limits of social networks and Supported Cooperative Work, designed and developed by the Social
web applications when they are used for sharing and generating Computing team of the Department of Computer Science of the
contents related to a territorial community, representing the state University of Turin, which consists in a new map-based social
of the art in crowdsourcing and showing information on interactive network capable of: to offer a geo-referenced representation of
maps. open and crowdsourced data through an interactive map; to be
focused on communities that share a territorial area of their interest
ACM Reference Format:
and collaborate in creating dynamic and public contents related to
Guido Boella, Luigi Sanasi, Claudio Schifanella, and Cristina Viano. 2018.
the area; to exploit the potentialities of social networks to create
Culturaturismo.piemonte: Coordinating Cultural and Touristic Operators
via the Georeferenced Civic Social Network FirstLife. In Proceedings of 2nd a virtual community and make it real at a local scale. FirstLife
Workshop on Advanced Visual Interfaces for Cultural Heritage (AVI-CH 2018). aims at fostering co-production (in the sense of the Nobel Prize
Vol. 2091. CEUR-WS.org, Article 4. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2091/paper4.pdf, Elinor Ostrom [7]) and Do It Yourself initiatives, providing a virtual
4 pages. place connected via maps to the concrete reality. Thus, the platform
by itself is intended to involve the different actors in developing
1 INTRODUCTION new services and initiatives, from institutions to associations, from
Much research on information visualization technologies for Cul- citizens to enterprises.
tural Heritage (CH) is focused on users and on the fruition of content FirstLife can be used to visualize in an intuitive way, integrate,
going beyond physical museums, e.g., using virtual tours or taking share, comment urban territorial data and make them useful for
advantage of social networking technologies to put users in contact strengthening social and professional communities in the real world,
with institutions and with each other. However, the same recent through virtual spaces for debating on strategic and operational
technologies can be used for the advantage also of institutions decision at different levels.
and cultural operators, who are facing increasing challenges in FirstLife harvests the knowledge and the services that are now
coordinating the wealth of initiatives happening in their territories. scattered around many websites often unknown to the wide public
This paper addresses the debate over the roles of ICT and infor- websites, focusing them on a local area. It reduces the overload-
mation visualization technologies to provide access to CH collec- ing of information by filtering them on a locality principle. There
tions, to support CH institutions and, at the same time, to reach a are several projects with different purposes in which FirstLife is
wider audience, by introducing the civic social network “FirstLife” currently involved, in Turin and elsewhere. Currently, FirstLife is
as an innovative visual tool for the organization, co-production the technological infrastructure of two major European innovation
and enjoy of the variety of CH related available information in a projects:
specific territory.
FirstLife is a platform intended as a shared virtual space for • WeGovNow is a H2020-EURO6-2015 research and innova-
coordination, cooperation and collaboration among public admin- tion project aimed to integrate in a platform technological
istrations, local institutions, civic organizations, businesses and solutions for local governance, to extend the participation of
citizens belonging to the same territorial area and sharing needs citizens and local stakeholders in decision-making processes
and projects over it. A map interface provides an intuitive visual (http://wegovnow.eu);
• Co-City is an Urban Innovative Actions project aimed to de-
velop a model of local economy based and co management of
AVI-CH 2018, May 29, 2018, Castiglione della Pescaia, Italy urban commons, to activate an inclusive urban regeneration
© 2018 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
(http://www.uia-initiative.eu/en/uia-cities/turin).
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AVI-CH 2018, May 29, 2018, Castiglione della Pescaia, Italy Guido Boella, Luigi Sanasi, Claudio Schifanella, and Cristina Viano
3 OVERCOMING THE STATE OF THE ART OF interactions impact on the status of the map and of the application
SOCIAL NETWORK AND OF WEB status at the same time. Scaling and visualization theories about
APPLICATIONS BASED ON A MAP traditional maps can be extended to digital maps in order to develop
web applications using maps as information management systems,
FirstLife is characterized by typical map and social network features data viewer and recommender systems. Nowadays, the fast and
• view posts and activities concerning the groups the user is generalized spreading of digital maps, and the related production
registered to; of geo-localized social media, is due to the intuitiveness of maps in
• subscribe to objects/places on the map to receive notifica- representing reality.
tions on the bulletin board; Nevertheless, apart from web geographical information systems
• view posts from people he/she is connected; (Web GIS), spatial information in digital maps are not connected
• perform queries by selecting the categories of information with the map geometries, but just placed in their spatial context,
he/she is interested in or by making searches with keywords. overlapped to an image.
But it also overcomes some of the major limits of social network Current applications showing contents on a map cannot be con-
and web application when they are used for sharing and generating sidered map-based applications since they do not exploit the map as
contents related to a territorial community. a knowledge management system, based on a visualization theory,
structured geographical entities and goal-related theming. FirstLife
3.1 Beyond social networks represents the state of the art in crowdsourcing and showing infor-
Currently, both private and institutional actors are also using the mation on interactive maps, thanks to its vectorial maps showing
most common social networks to promote the public dimension of urban spaces as objects rather than cartographic images, and to
their work [4] because those platforms offer the opportunity to dis- its ability to associate and cluster information at different scales
seminate information and engage people at a seemingly affordable (building, block, superblock, district, etc.).
cost [3]. Indeed, sharing visions, decision processes, project results,
and activities is a need increasingly heard from public and private 3.3 The interface
actors. But the existing social networks have several limitations
3.3.1 Entities model. The platform allows the sharing, represen-
[6, 9, 10]:
tation and management of geo-referenced data (aggregated with
• a personalist logic centered on the individual and on his/her reference to the scale of interest), temporalized (explorable in rela-
private life; tion to the period of interest), crowd-sourced by different types of
• purposes other than support the coordination of different users, referred to complex social entities corresponding to mark-
players in the city for public goals; ers on the map [2, 5]. The model of entities is organized into the
• relationships based only on personal connections; following five types:
• a global perspective, not focused on the local scale which is
still the main scale where we live and act. • Places;
The challenge is to design a digital platform to refactor the cur- • Events;
rent practices of cooperation between private and public sector • Work Groups linked to specific projects;
creating a shared virtual working environment to trace, plan, col- • News
laborate and coordinate the initiatives of multiple stakeholders • Extras such as stories and initiatives.
acting in the city. Differently from most mainstream social net-
works, FirstLife targets is not the person as a private individual but 3.3.2 Visualization, filtering and searching for contents. The main
rather as a citizen who lives, works in and enjoys urban spaces to- FirstLife interface is composed of a map and a lateral wall, contain-
gether with other people who share his/her interests and problems. ing summarized item cards. Single items can be opened clicking
It evolved into a relational environment with social networking on map markers or on their summarized card on the wall, this will
functionalities such as group membership and notification, centered open a detailed view that shows their complete details (such as
on an interactive map of the territory. The selected area and cate- categorization, description, linked URLs, etc.), their child entities,
gories are the only filters for the content on the bulletin board. No the initiatives they are part of and the posts and comments about
algorithm is used to recommend information, so as to avoid enclo- them.
sure in a filter bubble [8] and to increase serendipitous encounters The web interface has been conceived to offer the user complete
[1]. control over what he wants to visualize on the map, with the pos-
sibility to filter contents using: the main types of entities (Places,
3.2 Beyond web applications using maps Events, Groups, News or Extra in the standard model); the system
Starting from current limitations of web applications using maps, of categories and tags that users can choose to describe the entities;
FirstLife outlines an alternative approach based on building an the validity of entities in different time spans (thanks to a timeline
indexing system connecting scales and contents, on fixing visual- and a global calendar). The map itself represents a fifth filter that
ization and styling rules, and attributing an active role to the user acts on which entities are represented in the lateral wall. A search
in defining goals, area of interest and related contents. It is built bar allows to search either for an address, strings present in Entities’
upon a theoretical framework to develop map-based applications names or for tag. The detailed card has a link to center the map on
where: contents are connected to the map entities and the user something that has been reached in this way.
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Culturaturismo.piemonte AVI-CH 2018, May 29, 2018, Castiglione della Pescaia, Italy
3.3.3 Adding content and social/collaborative features. Single en-
tities can be added to FirstLife via a stepwise wizard that guides the
user in adding the requested categories for the chosen entity type.
After this first mapping step, all other users can interact adding
their opinions in form of posts. Users can receive notifications re-
garding new activities and entities they are interested by following
them.
3.3.4 Geolocalization and areas. Entities in FirstLife are not only
referenced to a single point in space: adding something in the same
geographical coordinates but at different zoom levels of the map
will link it to different areas on the territory (single building or
road, whole block, neighborhoods, entire city, etc.). This adds a
further dimension to model reality, for example a cultural event Figure 1: Cultura.Turismo, wall and entities on the map.
could take place in a single building, but a news could be of interest
for a whole cultural district.
3.3.5 Clustering entities. Since markers on the map can become
too crowded, depending of the chosen zoom level, we decided to
join them in a single marker when they would be rendered too
close to each other. To keep the map expressiveness given by single
markers, that are different, in shape and color, for the five main
types of entities, these "clustered" markers are represented with a
pie chart showing the total number of entities clustered and the
relative abundance of their types via their colors
4 FIRSTLIFE FOR THE MANAGEMENT AND
EXPERIENCE OF CULTURAL HERITAGE
The virtual space is structured by reflecting the organizational
logics and the need to share different programs and cultural and
tourist initiatives that are insistent on the regional territory. The Figure 2: Clustering system and timeline.
association of spatio-temporal data with semantic ontologies and
historical-artistic and cultural taxonomies, initiated with the Initia-
tive "FirstLife for Culture and Tourism in Piedmont", is being refined
thanks to experiments such as the one started in 2017 between the the territory in order to activate partnerships, collaborations and
Department of Computer Science and the Cultural Department of joint projects aimed at expanding the development opportunities.
Regione Piemonte, using as a case study the system of the Piedmon- Museums host stories of works and artists, of events linked to
tese UNESCO recognitions, and building specific features required exhibitions, permanent collections and educational activities, of
by the new scenario. groups who work and live the museum producing culture. With
Thanks to the use of the platform by coordinators, cultural work- FirstLife, the museum connects to the places linked to the works
ers and citizens, both internal management (at the level of single and the artists, opens up to the events on the territory and can make
territory and regional system) and interaction with the outside synergy with the other initiatives developed within the museum
(public and private subjects of the territory they belong to, citizens networks.
users of the cultural tourism offer of the sites) will benefit from the Businesses for culture and tourism can meet in order to activate
sharing of management, design, promotional and public interest new opportunities for developing services, products and projects
information related to the territories concerned. in their production sites; they can share the added value of their ac-
In FirstLife, the cultural associations, as groups of people who tivities through stories built in a participatory way with customers,
decide to co-organize activities and projects on their territory, can suppliers and collaborators; spread news in real time in their own
tell the stories, share news about their activities, courses and labora- area and through their networks; they maximize the impact of the
tories or look for collaborations and resources, create work groups events that are organized in the area by coordinating with other
for the organization and management of events and initiatives in local entities.
collaboration with other cultural operators and local institutions. Libraries can use FirstLife as a part of their cultural awareness
The local promotion consortiums, an integrated system of territo- initiatives, entering into direct communication with each other,
rial networks and themes for the protection and enhancement of receiving news about what happens in their network, coordinating
the historical, artistic and landscape heritage and of the productive in order to promote events in the area, facilitating self-organized
excellence of the piedmont region, integrate their networks and groups of students, readers, scholars, local educators who live the
initiatives starting from the places and groups and events active in library and actively co-produce community spaces and services.
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AVI-CH 2018, May 29, 2018, Castiglione della Pescaia, Italy Guido Boella, Luigi Sanasi, Claudio Schifanella, and Cristina Viano
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