Web 2.0 marks a new philosophy where user is the main actor and content producer: users write blogs and comments, they tag, link, and upload photos, pictures, videos, and podcasts. As a step further, Mobile 2.0 adapts Web 2.0 technology to mobile users. We intend to study how Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 together can be applied to the cultural heritage sector. A number of cultural institutions and museums are introducing in their projects some Web 2.0 applications, but the main knowledge source remains a small group of a few experts. Our approach is di erent: we plan to let all the users, the crowd, to be the main contents provider. We aim to the crowdsourcing, the long tail power, as we call fuel of cultural heritage system. In this paper, we describe the m-Dvara 2.0 project, whose aim is a system that lets users to create, share, and use cultural contents including mobile context-aware features.
With Web 2.0 and social software we represent all webbased services with \an architecture of participation", that is, one in which users interact and generate, share, and take care of the content (http://museumtwo.blogspot.com). Mobile 2.0 is the evolution of mobile technology to let us \capturing the content at the point of inspiration" (http:// blog.comtaste.com/2007/06/what_is_social_in_mobile_ web_2.html), that is, in the exact moment in which the inspiration and the opportunity exist to do it. Nowadays,
By reusing and remixing these tools, static content authorities could evolve to dynamic platforms for content generation and sharing.
In this paper, we propose a set of combined Web-based services available on a unique platform, m-Dvara 2.0, that allows users to create, share, and use cultural contents. As Web 2.0 applications gain success and become more interesting and rich with more and more users, m-Dvara 2.0 provides content on the basis of users participation and collaboration, in the very same spirit of wikipedia. The ambition of this project is to have a content repository populated by user-generated textual and multimedia content, in a new approach to improve user cultural experience through collaborating environments.
In the following sections, we rst analyze several cultural heritage organizations that use Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 services; then, we introduce purposes and main functionalities of the ongoing m-Dvara 2.0 project, which is in the analysis stage of its development.
Most museums, cultural sites, libraries, and other
educational and cultural websites are not involved in Web 2.0
evolution. They are the sole provider of contents, whereas users
are only consumers; for instance, Louvre Museum (http:
//www.louvre.fr), one of the rst museums with a website,
o ers no real Web 2.0 services [
However, some cultural heritage organizations and some educational istitutions have introduced Web 2.0 services in their sites. In this section we provide a short summary of these projects.
A group of US art museums are taking a folksonomic approach to their online collections: Steve (http:// www.steve.museum/) is a collaborative research project exploring the potential for user-generated descriptions of the subjects of works of art to improve access to museum collections and encourage engagement with cultural content.
Trant [
Brooklyn Museum site (http://www.brooklynmuseum.
org/community/) has a Community section with blogs,
podcasts, forums, and a Flickr-based photos sharing
service [
Brooklyn College Library (http://www.myspace.com/ brooklyncollegelibrary) uses MySpace to allow participants to post personal pro les containing their favourite books, movies, photos, and videos.
Many projects have been developed to study how to
integrate mobile devices in museum visits; [
From these few examples is evident that Web 2.0 technologies are transforming the methods of both production of and access to cultural and educational contents, and also that the heritage sectors evolve towards user generated content. However, all these \Museum 2.0" examples also share the common approach of merely giving to the users the tools to record what the exposition had been for them, whereas a few expert members still are the main content providers. This is di erent from a full 2.0 approach, in which the users are given the real opportunity of creating contents in a way that makes themselves essential. 3.
Our approach is to let users to be not only visitors of an exposition: we want them to be the main content creators through a framework of collaboration and participation based on Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 technologies. 3.1
We think users can be reliable and e ective content providers, and that the wisdom of crowds is a very important source of knowledge. Can the crowd actively participate to the cultural heritage life? Can the crowd become the undisputed contents owner? We believe it is possible or at least worthwhile to try. Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 appropriate tools already exist and they are widespread. We propose a unique platform that uses all Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 technologies for our purposes: m-Dvara 2.0. mDvara 2.0 is an ongoing project; it is an evolution of EDvara, a platform storing cultural and scienti c contents (http://edvara.uniud.it/india). The \m" and \2.0" in m-Dvara 2.0 highlight the mobile and social nature of our project. More in detail, m-Dvara 2.0 encompasses: a reuse of Web 2.0 technologies, a reuse of Mobile 2.0 technologies, a mix of web and mobile services, minimum implementation, through reuse and aggregation of Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 services already available online.
m-Dvara 2.0 is just an empty box with many services, whose content must be added by users, being they experts or novices. In m-Dvara 2.0 there is no central authority who publishes, owns, and controls all content.
We aim to mashup several Web 2.0 existing services (i.e., YouTube, Flickr, Blogger, etc.), in order to avoid unnecessary user e orts to interact with our system platform, and to work in an easy and comfortable way. In this way, we will provide an all-in-one familiar set of services for users. To ful ll real users requirements and expectations we will make several surveys. We plan to evaluate through several user testings how each single service improves user experience and if it is useful. We also plan to analyse the user behavior while using the whole integrated system. Finally we are going to observe if social and Web 2.0 tools are appropriate for di usion and perusal of cultural heritage, through evaluation of content growth and user participation level: we will observe the crowd behavior.
According to Web 2.0 concepts of remixability and aggregation, the development and adoption of standard software solutions enable websites to interact with each other by using SOAP, Javascript and any other web technology. This approach allows to interconnect websites in a more uid userfriendly way, not only for programmers but for users as well. m-Dvara 2.0 will be based on these methodologies, examples are:
OpenApi and OpenSocial Api (http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Open_API, http://code.google.com/apis/ opensocial/); OpenID (http://openid.net/); DataPortability philosophy (http://dataportability. org/);
For mobile context-aware feature, we will implement a
mobile service aggregator by exploiting MoBe, a framework for
developing context-aware mobile applications [
System functionalities can be classi ed according to: technology being used (a user can use a mobile device, desktop, notebook, etc.), user location (a user can be on-site or o -site).
To introduce m-Dvara 2.0 functionalities description, we present some examples of typical use cases.
Use case 1 On-site users with a mobile device, e.g., tourists visiting a museum, an artwork exhibition, an archaeological excavation, etc.
Update in real-time: the tourist can upload in realtime on m-Dvara 2.0 photo, video, audio, text about an artwork. Twitter, Jaiku technology, and/or YouTube Mobile (http://youtube.com/mobile) can be used to upload video.
Social tour : the system can helps tourists by
suggesting a tour. The tourist can request to the system an
ideal tour according to her preferences, and/or tourist
can select on her mobile device a tour criterion. There
are three main kinds of tours: custom, dynamic and
contextual tour. For custom tour we mean that
system can detect user information keeping track of her
actions (e.g., visited places or artworks, commented
posts) or it can evaluate user's pro le to set her
preferences, then system process these information in
order to create the user's ideal tour. A dynamic tour
does not relate to user's personal information, but it
depends on all users actions, thus user can decide to
visit the most viewed, most commented, or most voted
artworks. In other words, she can visit all the artworks
that the crowd (community) advises to see. Finally, in
a contextual tour, user can decide to visit only
artworks about a speci c topic or artworks belonging to
the same artist, and so on. In addition, a tourist can
change the tour criterion or she can add or remove
artworks to visit from the suggested list at any time.
To detect user location we intend to integrate Google
Mobile with MoBe location features [
Social guides: a cultural heritage system could be a guide. A tourist can record an artwork description as a guide and listen an audio description from her mobile device about the item she is examining. She can also access a wiki in order to read or use a screen reader to know what she needs. All di erent descriptions about a certain object are rated according to the crowd opinion (social evaluation). We can use, again, Twitter or Jaiku.
Live tagging: the tourist can tag, using her own mobile device, the artwork she is looking at.
Evaluation & Rating : the tourist can rate the artwork
she is looking at. A simple rating application is
automatically downloaded and executed on the tourist's
mobile device, thanks to the MoBe framework [
M-Bookmark : to bookmark from mobile devices. For this we can integrate Mobilicio.us.
Travel diary : the system can keep track of artworks, monuments and places the user has seen, in order to maintain a personal travel diary.
M-Teach: students can use their own mobile devices for educational lab activities.
Use case 2 O -site users with a desktop or notebook device.
Wiki per topic: the user can add contents about a topic or an object to the open wiki, e.g. Wikipedia.
Wiki per author : every user can write own wiki page, e.g. Knol. 3D collaborative environment : we can merge the 3D museum (e.g. Second Life) with wiki, chat, photo, and comments of users. In this way the user can visit 3D environment but she can also update wiki, talk with other visitors, write comments...
Blog: the user can write a post about an artwork on her own blog, on a blog dedicated to a speci c topic, or comment other blogs.
Bookmark : the user can bookmark other users webpages or artwork dedicated web-pages.
Personal pro le and social network : user can manage her social network, de ning white and black lists. She can select her \friends" in order to create a personal sub-community. She can also suggest other users she is interested in, in order to be noti ed of their new posts. Similarly a user can suggest posts or themes she is interested in to be noti ed of their evolution. Use case 3 O -site users with a mobile device.
MoBlog: to upload photo, video, text, audio on the blog section. We can exploit MoBlog.
Update in real-time: tourist can upload in real-time photo, video, audio, text about an artefact.
To enhance user functionalities, we are considering what we call the user events cloud. The system will collect all available data about registered users, keeping track of all events generated (i.e., real or digital visited objects, topics of generated content, past expositions viewed, etc.), in order to create for each user an events cloud (a sort of user cultural history). We would like to use the power of the long tail of those users that know (or use) only few system functionality and help us to enjoy new features or improve already existing services (e.g., rank of content to be shown in a social tour or by social guides). All m-Dvara 2.0 functionalities will be o ered to all kind of users, although we foresee a graceful degradation depending on the user context, the location, and the technology currently used.
In this paper we have presented how various current museum evolution projects integrate Web 2.0 services for improving user experience. We emphasized the common limitations of these \Museum 2.0" examples: they share the approach of merely providing to the users the tools to record their personal experience, while a few expert members still are the main content providers. This is di erent from a full 2.0 approach, in which the users participate and collaborate as the central content creators. This is the approach followed in the m-Dvara 2.0 project, whose aim is to produce a service that allows the crowd of users to control and manage the knowledge ow through collaboration and participation. We will develop an aggregator of Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 services for institutions of humanistic eld.
Many are the problems that we are taking into account. The reuse and remixing of already existing external services involve the direct dependence from: their implementation - How to develop an architecture able to aggregate services featuring their own standard open interfaces and services providing personalized interfaces? their life - What will happen if some service does not exist anymore?
The authors acknowledge the nancial support of the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR) within the FIRB project number RBIN04M8S8. 5.