=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2235/paper3
|storemode=property
|title=PLUGGY: A pluggable Social Platform for Cultural Heritage Awareness and Participation
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2235/paper3.pdf
|volume=Vol-2235
|authors=Nikos Frangakis,Luis Molina Tanco,Peter Smatana,Jan Hreno,Lorenzo Picinali,Angelos Amditis,Veranika Lim
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/euromed/FrangakisMSHPAL18
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==PLUGGY: A pluggable Social Platform for Cultural Heritage Awareness and Participation==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2235/paper3.pdf
PLUGGY: A Pluggable Social Platform for Cultural
Heritage Awareness and Participation
Nikos Frangakis[2], Veranika Lim[1], Luis Molina Tanco[3], Peter Smatana[4], Jan
Hreno[4], Lorenzo Picinali[1], Luca Simeone [5] and Angelos Amditis[2]
1
Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom
v.lim@imperial.ac.uk, l.picinali@imperial.ac.uk
2 Institute of Computer and Communication Systems, Zografou, Greece
nikos.frangakis@iccs.gr, a.amditis@iccs.gr
3
University of Málaga, Málaga, Spain
lmtanco@uma.es
4
Technical University of Košice, Slovakia
peter.smatana@tuke.sk, Jan.Hreno@tuke.sk
5
VIANET
luca@vianet.it
Abstract. One of the preconditions for genuine sustainability is a heritage that is
present anywhere and anytime in everyday life. We present PLUGGY, a
Pluggable Social Platform for Heritage Awareness and Participation. PLUGGY
will address the need of society to be actively involved in cultural heritage
activities, not only as an observer but also as a creator and a major influencing
factor. With PLUGGY, we aim to bridge this gap by providing the tools needed
to allow users to share their local knowledge and everyday experience with
others, together with the contribution of cultural institutions. Users will be able
to build extensive networks around a common area of interest, connecting the
past, the present and the future. It will be powered by its users and puts people's
values, aspirations and needs first. Users of PLUGGY will be the providers of
information about cultural heritage in the everyday and ordinary, real life.
Through its social platform and by using its innovative curation tools, designed
to solely focus on a niche area in social media, citizens will be able to act as
skilled storytellers by creating fascinating personalised stories and share them
through social networking with friends, associates and professionals. In this
paper, we describe a structured formative and summative evaluative approach of
PLUGGY’s core concepts and the results will be used to inform and improve its
design.
Keywords: Cultural Heritage, Crowd sourced, Content, Digital Cultural
Heritage, Faro Convention.
Cultural Informatics 2018, November 3, 2018, Nicosia, Cyprus. Copyright
held by the author(s).
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1 Short description
1.1 A new Paradigm in Cultural Heritage
PLUGGY has been inspired and built around the Convention on the Value of Cultural
Heritage for Society (Faro Convention, 2005) and expresses its notions and principles
in most of its developments. The Faro Convention, born out of the desire of the
Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe to create a framework that would
show what kind of economic, social and cultural possibilities and resources cultural
heritage can offer, argues that a heritage that is everywhere, and relevant to everyday
life, is likely to be one of the preconditions for genuine sustainability. This is certainly
the case at the social and cultural levels, but also at the economic and environmental
ones [1]. The convention itself stresses the importance of heritage communities,
deemed as social groups who value specific aspects of cultural heritage which they wish
to sustain and transmit to future generations within the framework of public action [2].
The Faro Convention outlines a framework for considering the role of citizens in the
definition, decision-making and management processes related to the cultural
environment in which communities operate and evolve. Citizen participation has
become an ethical obligation and a political necessity. It revitalises society, strengthens
democracy and creates governance that can renew the conditions for living together,
encouraging wellbeing and a better quality of life. Thus, a new heritage paradigm is
becoming visible. In the traditional view, material things were privileged, and values
were based on supposedly intrinsic properties or represented a national history. This
was a paradigm that encouraged the reduction of heritage to tourism and consumption.
In contrast, the emerging new paradigm puts the production of heritage in the
foreground, and aims to encompass greater democratic participative action, with greater
concern for the local and the everyday. It uses the concept of landscape that is promoted
by the European Landscape Convention (which is increasingly popular in academia and
policy) as a global frame for heritage, recognising that heritage assets and objects offer
fundamental social and economic values and benefits far beyond those traditionally
recognised [3].
1.2 Overview of PLUGGY
Currently, limited ICT tools exist to provide better support to citizens in their everyday
activities in shaping cultural heritage and being shaped by it. There are important
initiatives to build applications and repositories for heritage dissemination which
compile collections from museums, libraries and other institutions through
virtualization (e.g., Europeana, Google Cultural Institute). However, these have been
top-down driven by institutions and have so far not succeeded at involving citizens in
the creation of heritage communities around them. In contrast, current social platforms
have demonstrated their potential to build networks through the individual and
distributed contributions of users. However, their possibilities have not been fully
exploited with regards to cultural heritage promotion and integration in people's
everyday life. PLUGGY aims to bridge this gap by providing the necessary tools to
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allow users to share their local knowledge and everyday experience with others together
with the contribution of cultural institutions such as museums. This joint effort builds
extensive networks around a common interest in connecting the past, the present and
the future. This is in accordance to Flinn [3], who emphasized the importance of
diversity within our national histories and archives, and that we all, professional and
non- professionals, need to find a way of ensuring that community histories and
archives are preserved.
The objectives in this project are to: (1) design, develop and implement a heritage-
centric social platform; (2) design an architecture of the social platform to allow the
easy integration of applications; the scalability of the platform and the support of
specialised devices (e.g., AR/VR/trackers etc.); (3) design, develop and implement the
integration of the PLUGGY Social Platform with online digital collections and other
social media; (4) design, develop and implement the curatorial tool for creating stories
with meaningful narratives resulting in Virtual Exhibitions around specific topics; (5)
design, develop and implement four different applications, utilizing the social platform
and the curatorial tool, in order to showcase the potential of the platform and to be used
to kick-start applications for the post-project life of the platform; and finally (6)
evaluate the impact of PLUGGY and the pluggable applications in a variety of case
studies.
2 Partnership
The PLUGGY consortium spans across 5 different countries: Greece, Spain, Italy, UK,
and Slovakia. The universities included (UMA, TUK, ICL) and the research institute
(ICCS) specialise in social platforms, authoring tools, Virtual and Augmented Reality,
knowledge management, semantics and 3D audio. The SMEs (XTS, VIA, CLIO) have
extended knowledge and experience in gamification, game development, user
engagement and exploitation of these technologies, while CLIO has also experience in
cultural heritage stories curation. The museums (PIOP, ESM) receive about 210,000
visitors per annum, palcing them in an ideal to position to disseminate PLUGGY and
to engage their visitors in the Social Platform.
3 Open challenges
3.1 The Role of Communities
According to Giaccardi et al. [4], contemporary heritage studies teach us that values are
not attached just to artefacts, buildings or sites, nor are they frozen in time. Instead,
they are the results of ongoing interactions in the lived world of ordinary people.
Giaccardi et al. emphasizes that heritage is something we socially construct in the
context of our own lives as a way of meaningfully interacting with our past and shaping
our vision of the future. Fortunately, digital and social technologies are facilitating
distributed forms of curatorial practice, which can be harnessed to democratize history
[6]. Although, we still need to understand better whether and how ubiquitous and
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communication technologies like social media shape and sustain a shared sense of
identity and belonging for current and future generations [4], there are examples of
previous work in cultural heritage where social media plays a central role, e.g. in
distributed curation and personalisation (further discussed below).
3.2 Personalization in Cultural Encounters
Social media can also play a role in the personalisation of information technologies.
People are often overloaded with an increasing amount and variety of cultural items
making it difficult to identify what is interesting. Therefore, there is a need to
personalise visits to cultural objects, to visitors' knowledge and connections, to ensure
interactions are effective. For example, ArtLinks was developed to provide a guidance
system based on a public display in museum exhibits that allowed visitors to create and
use tags to help guide other visitors [7]. ArtLinks aimed at encouraging social
interactions and enhancing experiences by supporting visualisation of people, words
and their connections related to an exhibition. Similarly, MobiTag [8] is an electronic
guide that supports semantic, social, and spatial navigation in museums by allowing
visitors to create and vote for tags. Furthermore, Han et al. [9] developed a mobile
application called Lost State College (LSC) and showed that users utilised social
features as a way of learning local history and interacting with others, co-creating
digital traces and rich layers of local history information. Users shared information
using social features, which allowed different types of connection to the local history.
Personalisation, derived through interactions between visitors of cultural environments,
has also been supported using data from popular available social media sources such as
Twitter, Instagram, Wikipedia and Flickr. For example, McGookin and Brewster
designed PULSE [10] to allow users to gain a vibe (i.e., an intrinsic understanding of
the people, places and activities around their current location) using Twitter data. As
users moved, PULSE downloaded public messages (tweets) generated by any user in
the current location. Then, PULSE would select the closest tweet and insert it in a
virtual 3D auditory environment: users heard tweets as whispered conversations.
Bellens et al. [11] explored how social media data can be employed to study tourism
on European Cultural Routes and showed its potential for investigating a complex
touristic object such as a cultural route. They combined text related to photos on
Instagram with Wikipedia for geographical places. This allowed them to identify the
most popular stops and localities related to the cultural route. Bujari et al. [1] proposed
PhotoTrip, an interactive tool able autonomously to recommend cultural heritage
locations along travel itineraries even if those locations were not mainstream. PhotoTrip
identified points of interest by gathering pictures and related information from Flickr
and Wikipedia and then providing the user with suggestions and recommendations.
Related work has demonstrated how digital cultural heritage transforms the way of
experiencing or learning community heritage through social media. The communities
are being increasingly involved through distributed curation, where technologies
mediate and allow them to contribute to our histories, and personalisation, i.e., where
communities’ online activities are used to aid in decision-making. Current social
platforms have demonstrated their potential to build networks through the individual
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and distributed contributions of users. To our knowledge, however, their possibilities
have not been fully exploited with regards to cultural heritage promotion and
integration in people's everyday life.
4 Tools
PLUGGY architecture is depicted on Figure 1. The main idea is to provide a Content
Management Services system available via a well-defined REST API to all possible
user tools. In our case example user tools will be the Green boxes in the figure:
• Social Platform
• Curatorial Tools
• Applications (AR, Geo, 3D)
• Games
Figure 1: PLUGGY Logical Architecture
All these user tools will be able to use any of REST API interfaces. That for example
means, that even if the Curatorial Tools are the main tool to create new stories, Games
or other Applications can also publish their stories.
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The Web Application Platform is a modular platform that allows usage of common
functionality, like logging and security, for the Social Platform, Curatorial Tool and
Application Developer Tool.
The green boxed user tools will be described mainly in their corresponding
deliverables. However, the red boxes need to be clarified here. Let’s call these red boxes
the “Core PLUGGY Components”. From the Figure 1it is obvious that there are two
main modules namely:
• Content Management Services
• PLUGGY Content Repository
Content Management Services will contain all needed software components to
process, store and serve information to the external user tools via the REST API. These
components are:
• External Repository Content Connectors
• Hinting/Suggestions and Recommendation Services
• Search Services
• Authorization,
• Authentication and IPR Services
• Social Platform Services
• Notification Services
• Content Services
All of these components access the PLUGGY Content Repositories for all possible
information described later in the Information View section of this deliverable. Basic
functions of all different components is described in the following text
Yellow boxes present two basic principles of extensibility of PLUGGY platform:
• Pluggable Application Interface - allow users to explore and create content of
different types, that core PLUGGY application does not support
• External Repositories Content Connectors - allow users to reuse content from
existing external content repositories
4.1 PLUGGY components
In the following table, we list all the components currently developed.
Table 7: Web Application Platform
Component name: Web Application Platform
Description: The Web Application Platform will:
Provide common modular platform for Social platform, Curatorial Tool and Application
Developer Tools
Provide security middleware
Provide web components shareable between different modules
Provide common PLUGGY layouts
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Allow modules to use Pluggable Applications Interface
Dependencies: Content Management Services
Technologies: Angular5, HTML5, CSS, TypeScript
Table 8: Social Platform component
Component name: Social Platform
Description: The Social Platform will:
Allow users to access to the PLUGGY content
Provide a visual representation of the virtual assets
Allow users to introduce media content
Allow users to access Virtual Exhibitions
Allow users to search in PLUGGY overall content
Allow users to create social networks and communities
Allow to link with other social platforms
Support content exchange with the content management services
Dependencies: Content Management Services
Technologies: Angular 5, HTML 5, CSS, JavaScript, Typescript, 3D content viewer based on Unity3D
and webgl.
Table 9: Application Developer Tool Component
Component name: Application Developer Tool
Description: The Application Developer Tool will:
Provide user interface for administrator to manage pluggable applications
Provide reporting mechanism for the users of PLUGGY to report issues with pluggable
applications
Enable developers of applications to register their applications to PLUGGY
Provide guidelines and set of examples for application developers
Dependencies: Web Application Platform
Content Management Services
Technologies: Angular5, HTML5, CSS, TypeScript
Table 7: Web Application Platform
Component name: Web Application Platform
Description: The Web Application Platform will:
Provide common modular platform for Social platform, Curatorial Tool and Application
Developer Tools
Provide security middleware
Provide web components shareable between different modules
Provide common PLUGGY layouts
Allow modules to use Pluggable Applications Interface
Dependencies: Content Management Services
Technologies: Angular5, HTML5,CSS, TypeScript
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Table 8: Social Platform component
Component name: Social Platform
Description: The Social Platform will:
Allow users to access to the PLUGGY content
Provide a visual representation of the virtual assets
Allow users to introduce media content
Allow users to access Virtual Exhibitions
Allow users to search in PLUGGY overall content
Allow users to create social networks and communities
Allow to link with other social platforms
Support content exchange with the content management services
Dependencies: Content Management Services
Technologies: Angular 5, HTML 5, CSS, JavaScript, Typescript, 3D content viewer based on Unity3D
and webgl.
Table 9: Application Developer Tool Component
Component name: Application Developer Tool
Description: The Application Developer Tool will:
Provide user interface for administrator to manage pluggable applications
Provide reporting mechanism for the users of PLUGGY to report issues with pluggable
applications
Enable developers of applications to register their applications to PLUGGY
Provide guidelines and set of examples for application developers
Dependencies: Web Application Platform
Content Management Services
Technologies: Angular 5, HTML 5, CSS, JavaScript, Typescript
4.2 Interdependencies among PLUGGY components
PLUGGY will build upon available software and libraries in order to speed up
development and utilise the open source communities. Some libraries have already been
identified as potential components of the PLUGGY software suite, namely the libraries
from KnightLab and the software from the EU-funded project 3D Tune-In. In the figure
below, one can see the relation between the software already identified and the several
components of PLUGGY. The KnightLab libraries and the software of 3DTune-In
already come under a specific licence, the Mozilla and GPLv3 licence respectively.
Currently there are three distinct components in PLUGGY: a) the back-end services,
b) the Social Platform and Curatorial Tool and c) the mobile apps. These components
will communicate with each other using web services. The diagram below describes
the interdependencies among these components, where the sense of an arrow from A to
B means that A makes use of B. This implies that the social platform and curatorial
tool, as well as the apps, should be published under a licence scheme compatible with
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the third parties they are using. Therefore, a GPLv3 licence is being considered for
these components.
However, as we do not want to impose GPLv3 licence to future apps, the PLUGGY
back end should be published under a less restrictive licence, as for instance MIT (see
4.1.3 infra) or Apache (see 4.1.5 infra). In any event, the PLUGGY back end licence
must be compatible with the licences attached to software the back end incorporates.
Figure 2: Interdependencies among PLUGGY's components
5 Conclusions
With PLUGGY’s social platform, Curatorial Tool and pluggable applications, any
sensitised individuals will be able to enrich the cultural heritage of their focal point by
uploading materials (i.e. audio, video, images, text, 3D models) and use these in
combination with what is already available in the platform to create a more
personalised, interactive, and to-the- point story which can then be shared online.
PLUGGY, however, will face several challenges: for example, is there room for yet
another social platform? And what is the value of having a centralised social platform
specifically for cultural heritage over the potential of the various social media services
already in use? Moreover, it might be argued that PLUGGY also faces the challenges
inherent to the paradigm shift in cultural heritage; institutions and professionals trained
to safeguard traditional cultural heritage may have difficulties in applying their skills
to safeguard intangible heritage (or any other type of heritage) due to differences in
perceptions or truths held in society. On the other hand, it will allow for a diversity of
ways to look at history. This will further extend to the issue of trust. What mechanisms
should be implemented to gain trust in content and content creators for an effective use
of a platform like PLUGGY? Nevertheless, we expect PLUGGY to have significant
impacts socially, economically and ecologically. First, it can promote wider
understanding of heritage. Second, it can improve innovation capacity and integration
of new knowledge as it will mobilise the economic sectors, i.e., tourism and the creative
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industries, indirectly promoting local development and entrepreneurship. Finally, it is
expected to promote cultural diversity.
6 Aknowledgements
This work is a part of the PLUGGY project. PLUGGY has received funding from the
European Union’s Horizon 2020 research & innovation programme under grant
agreement no 726765. Content reflects only the authors’ view and European
Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it
contains.
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