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  <front>
    <journal-meta />
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Creating and applying a data model for an Augmented Documentation of Cultural Heritage</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Myrto Koukouli</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Akrivi Katifori</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Katerina Servi</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Labrini Papastratou</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Yannis Ioannidis</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Athena Research and Innovation Center, Aigialias &amp; Chalepa</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Marousi, Athens</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="GR">Greece</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff1">
          <label>1</label>
          <institution>Ephorate of Antiquities of Preveza</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Eth. Antistasis 143, Preveza</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="GR">Greece</country>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <abstract>
        <p>In the present work we propose a data model to support an augmented type of documentation of cultural heritage, one addressed to the wider public. Since more and more collections of artifacts are being digitized and published on the Web, the way they are presented and their content should also adapt to the audience that now has access to it. We propose that the documentation be extended to include facts about the interpretation of the artifacts and about usually unseen connections between them and between our contemporary lives and the past. The sections of this work describe the process of creating the data model for the augmented documentation, applying it to real-life data and producing the augmented part of the documentation. A short discussion follows about the use of augmented documentation in practice as well as some general conclusions and next steps.</p>
      </abstract>
      <kwd-group>
        <kwd>eol&gt;data model</kwd>
        <kwd>cultural heritage documentation</kwd>
        <kwd>cultural heritage experiences</kwd>
        <kwd>storytelling</kwd>
      </kwd-group>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>1. Introduction</title>
      <p>In recent years, the number of Cultural Heritage Institutions that publish their collections on
the Web has increased rapidly. Many of those collections are open to the public. In many cases
however, the presented data are not addressed to the wider audience that now has access to them
but resemble more closely the documentation created for use within the scientific community.
At the same time, there are specialties that could benefit greatly from enriched cultural heritage
collections which they could explore and gather information. Teachers, students, authors
and cultural experiences designers are some. The augmented documentation is a proposed
methodology for presenting enriched cultural heritage knowledge through the documentation
of artifacts and archaeological sites or monuments.</p>
      <p>
        In past presentations we had talked about the idea, structure and main goals of augmented
documentation [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ]. In the present work we dwell into the data model that was created to host it
and the steps we followed in order to apply it to real-life data. An account is also given on the
challenges of producing the augmented part of the documentation and on the potential its use
shows.
      </p>
      <p>In the sections that follow we mention works related to our own (Section 2). Next, we briefly
describe the concept of augmented documentation, the motivation behind its creation and the
requirements for this type of documentation (Section 3) and we make an introduction to our
data model(Section 4). After that, a report is given on the various aspects of the process we
followed to apply our model to data from the research project Voeska (Section 5). Last, the use
of augmented documentation in practice is discussed (Section 6) and a few conclusions and
next steps are listed (Section 7).</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>2. Related work</title>
      <p>
        The idea of reflecting on the past and its connection to our present was central in the CrossCult
project, too. Its “reflective topics” played a central part in the ontology that was created and
served as the bonds that connect artifacts and events across Europe heritage and as starting
points for discovering alternative narrations inside the knowledge web of semantic links that
was created [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2 ref3 ref4">2, 3, 4</xref>
        ]. The Narratives in Digital Libraries project proposes the use of narratives as
a means to explore digital libraries such as Europeana1, connect artifacts to concepts and capture
the interest of visitors [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
        ]. They developed the “Narrative Ontology” and a dedicated software
for creating the narratives. The Agora project introduced the term “digital hermeneutics” and
its main goal is to use historical events in order to produce an interpretation of an artifact’s
historical context. The relationships between objects and events or events between one another
are grouped and ultimately create a narrative [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
        ]. Another interesting project is mythLOD. In
this project a knowledge graph was created that connects mythological events described in
literature to their depiction in artwork from a variety of artists, locations and periods. Cultural
heritage experts annotated the artifacts with references to literature pieces that mention the
same episode. The links created between artifacts and myths provide an alternative knowledge
experience to the users of the provided platforms [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
        ]. Last, the SPICE project introduces Citizen
Curation as a way to engage the interest of groups of people that are usually less involved
with museum activities [8]. During this project, visitors were guided through the exhibits of
a museum by scripts organized according to themes that they could relate to their own lives.
Additionally, the visitors could create new scripts for other visitors to follow.
      </p>
      <p>Despite the similarities concerning the ultimate goal, to stimulate the visitors’ interest and
curiosity, our approach is somewhat diferent than the described projects, as it will be shown in
the sections that follow. The SPICE project’s approach seems closer to our own, however our
focus lies closer to making alternate views of cultural heritage available in the documentation
itself, so that they can later on fuel the creation of any type of experience. For our data model,
we chose to build on already developed schemata and keep it simple in order to focus more on
developing a methodology for creating the augmented content itself.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>3. Augmented documentation of cultural heritage</title>
      <p>The idea of augmenting the documentation of cultural heritage came during past research
projects, while observing the advantages that a well-designed narrative or experience ofers for
fostering public engagement and historical empathy [9] to visitors of cultural heritage sites and
museums [10, 11, 12]. The CHESS project2 [13] focused on the application of personalized digital
storytelling as a story-centric, as opposed to object-centric, approach to heritage communication,
highlighting the context of the exhibits function. We experimented with the power of digital
storytelling and identified the multidisciplinary aspect [ 14] and the challenges involved in
its creation [15]. The EMOTIVE project3 aimed to enhance the impact of digital storytelling,
prioritizing a more direct and afective perspective on the archaeological content - that of the
people of the past - and researching designs that promote reflection through sociality and
dialogue. To support the design needs of the project, we prepared “interpretation cards” for
artifacts that would be included in storytelling experiences [16]. Those cards were created by
the content experts and given to the storytelling authors as a form of starting point or source of
inspiration. Apart from descriptive characteristics, those cards contained information about the
interpretation and importance of the artifacts or their context, connected them with sociological
concepts and included two types of questions, questions that may rise from viewing the item and
its description and questions to provoke a feeling of reflection over the past life of the artifact
and its connection to universal values that are still relevant today. The use of the interpretation
cards improved the engagement of the recipients and promoted their curiosity.</p>
      <sec id="sec-3-1">
        <title>3.1. Motivation</title>
        <p>The efects that the interpretation cards had in the overall experience of the participants showed
us that the documentation of cultural heritage can by itself provide a starting point for the
creation of meaningful stories and all types of activities for cultural heritage. We observed the
content creators in their work and we also asked authors, teachers and other content creators
about the type of information they seek when designing an activity or a narrative. Most of them
agreed that a lot of efort is required to gain access to reliable sources of information. Even
more so, to find information that has the ability to inspire them to create something original
and meaningful.</p>
        <p>
          Our idea is to integrate this type of information into the documentation of cultural heritage
assets, especially those published on the Web, in order to give content providers scientifically
accurate information that can also inspire them, give them the trigger they need to be creative.[
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
          ]
describes the concept of augmented documentation in further detail. In the sections that follow,
we elaborate on the steps to implement it so that it can be used in practice.
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-2">
        <title>3.2. Requirements</title>
        <p>2https://www.chessexperience.eu/
3https://emotiveproject.eu/
The requirements for the data model of augmented documentation should combine the aspects
of the EMOTIVE interpretation cards that engaged their audience, with good practices for the
design and application of data models. The model should be easily applied to pre-existing data
and be also easy for team members with no technical knowledge to comprehend and use.</p>
        <p>For this first attempt to model augmented documentation, we decided to include an
interpretation field for information on the context, interpretation and interesting facts about the asset
and the two types of questions, as they were introduced in the interpretation cards. Additionally,
the data should be enriched with links to external resources and controlled vocabularies should
be utilized in every opportunity. The keywords controlled vocabulary in particular should be
created using general socio-political terms that have a universal value and can link the assets
beyond their type, provenance or chronology.</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>4. The data model</title>
      <p>Taking into account the outcomes of our research on the requirements for augmented
documentation, we identified the following basic elements for our model:</p>
      <sec id="sec-4-1">
        <title>1. the fields that are usually part of a basic cultural heritage documentation,</title>
        <p>2. one field for keywords,
3. one field for the interpretation or other interesting details of the artifact,
4. links to external resources, as many as possible, to ensure reusability,
5. information questions and their answers, and
6. reflection questions.</p>
        <p>To address the requirements for the basic cultural heritage documentation content we chose
to use the Europeana Data Model (EDM)4 as the core model. EDM ofers a simple and flexible
way to describe cultural heritage assets while facilitating the creation of links to other web
resources and, as a result, promoting the formation of a single knowledge graph for European
cultural heritage [17]. Additionally, the large amount of data already published using this
model will increase the interoperability of our own. The EDM model uses separate classes to
represent the actual item which the metadata describes (edm:ProvidedCHO) from the source
of its digital views (ore:Aggregation). In this way, a single physical item can have multiple
Aggregations, meaning sources of digital representations linked to it. On the contrary, each
Aggregation resource only links to a single ProvidedCHO. The model consists of originally
created classes and properties, and others borrowed from the OAI Object Reuse and Exchange
(ORE)5, the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS)6, the Dublin Core elements, terms
and types7, the W3C Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT)8, the Creative Commons9 and the SIOC
Services Ontology Module (SVCS)10 namespaces. In our model we make use of a subset of
the EDM original classes and properties, some of the Dublin Core elements and terms and the
4http://www.europeana.eu/schemas/edm/
5http://www.openarchives.org/ore/terms/
6http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core/
7https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/dublin-core/dcmi-terms/
8http://www.w3.org/tr/vocab-dcat/
9http://creativecommons.org/ns
10http://rdfs.org/sioc/services#
ore:Aggregation class. Finally, we expect resources of type skos:Concept to be the values of
select properties, as explained in Section 5.2.</p>
        <p>To ensure the ability to support more complex cultural heritage documentation
requirements in the future, we chose to associate our model with CIDOC CRM11 by introducing the
E18_Physical_Thing and E27_Site classes for moveable finds or archaeological sites and
monuments respectively. For modeling the questions and answers as well as their connection to
the assets, we researched the options given by CIDOC CRM and other schemata for cultural
heritage but did not find an acceptable semantic representation of what we intended to achieve.
We wanted to avoid creating our own classes at this early stage of the endeavor, so we chose a
more generalized approach and made use of classes from the schema.org12 ontology. We defined
the cultural heritage assets as instances of the Thing class and the questions and answers as
Question and Answer. An overview of the model can be seen in Figure 1.</p>
        <p>As an edm:ProvidedCHO, each one of our assets is linked by the incoming
edm:aggregatedCHO property to a single ore:Aggregation that carries its digital
representations. Depending on the asset being a moveable find or an archaeological site or monument,
it also becomes a crm:E18_Physical_Thing or a crm:E27_Site. As a schema:Thing, it is
connected to instances of the schema:Question class via the schema:subjectOf and, its reverse,
the schema:about property. An asset can be linked to multiple questions and a question to
multiple assets. Furthermore, the instances of schema:Question that are Information Questions
are linked to their answer by the schema:acceptedAnswer property. A single answer can be the
schema:acceptedAnswer of multiple questions.</p>
        <p>For modeling the interpretation field, a generalized approach was adopted once more. Since
11http://www.cidoc-crm.org/cidoc-crm/
12https://schema.org/
the assets are instances of either the E18_Physical_Thing or the E27_Site class, we use the
P3_has_note property from CIDOC CRM for the interpretation text. The final model contains
the majority of properties of the EDM model, the P3_has_note property from CIDOC CRM,
the text, acceptedAnswer, subjectOf and about properties from schema.org and uses for the
questions and answers some of the DublinCore properties that are also present in the EDM.
Figures 2 and 3 show the full schema for cultural heritage assets and for questions and answers
respectively.</p>
        <p>The augmented documentation data model was designed to facilitate the creation of links with
external web resources but also within the same collection, thus ofering multiple ways in which
it can be explored. Though the cultural heritage assets are the obvious entry point for such an
exploration, the answers can serve this purpose as well. They were designed as autonomous
texts with a title, authors, references and keywords. So, one can just as easily begin the discovery
by reading an answer and, through the questions connected to it, be redirected to associated
items in the collection. For example, a text about burial gifts in the dataset presented in Section 5
can lead to 11 cultural heritage assets via the question “What was the purpose of burial gifts?”.
The questions are shared between assets and ofer one more, less obvious, way to discover
the collection, especially in the case of reflection questions which are meant to be generalized
and focused on universal concepts, values and situations. Finally, the encouragement to use
controlled vocabularies and links to external resources as much as possible can further enhance
the reusability and accessibility of the collection. The keywords, in particular, if chosen based
on a specific strategy, can highlight deeper connections between the assets in the same way as
the reflection questions.</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
      <title>5. Applying the data model</title>
      <p>In Cultural Heritage, as in other domains that rely on descriptions and interpretations of the
facts as well as in measurements of their characteristics, the application of a data model and the
conformance with good practices such as FAIR data, often raises challenges. The organization
level of the original data can vary greatly, from hand-written reports to fully organized data
tables or complex digital collection management systems. Furthermore, the documentation in
most cases is created having a human reader and not a machine as the recipient. The approach
one follows in order to apply a data model should account for the particular characteristics of
the data and requires the assistance of cultural heritage experts. In this section we describe
some of the challenges we faced while applying the augmented documentation data model to
real-life documentation data.</p>
      <p>The Voeska project13 was a three-year research project (2020-2023), funded by the Greek
government and the European Union, that aimed to promote the cultural heritage of Arta, a
city in Western Mainland Greece. One of the tasks was to create a digital repository containing
the documentation for part of the collection of artifacts and archaeological sites or monuments
under the jurisdiction of the local Ephorate of Antiquities. This gave us the opportunity to test
the idea of augmented documentation and, as a result, our data model.</p>
      <p>In the sub-sections that follow we describe our approach to apply our data model to preexisting
cultural heritage data and then create the augmented part of the documentation. The steps
towards implementing this Augmented Documentation can be summarized as follows:</p>
      <sec id="sec-5-1">
        <title>1. An initial assessment of the data was made. 2. We decided which controlled vocabularies to use. 3. The data was cleaned and an initial enrichment was applied. 4. The augmented part of the documentation was created.</title>
        <sec id="sec-5-1-1">
          <title>5.1. The original data</title>
          <p>As is the case with most data collections of cultural heritage institutions, the original data was
created through the course of many years and its primary purpose was to be used within the
Ephorate of Antiquities for cataloging moveable finds and sites and to keep track of artifacts on
display and in storage. The largest part of the data for the Voeska project was extracted from
a collection management system into excel spreadsheets while other datatables were created
using data from other sources. The total number of processed records was 638, all written in
Greek. These include artifacts and sites from Ancient, Byzantine and a few from Ottoman times
from the Arta area.</p>
          <p>In the original data, the use of controlled vocabularies was limited to a hierarchy and a list of
plain text terms for artifact types and building materials. No specific documentation strategy
had been followed in the descriptions and titles, and fields such as the dimensions or chronology
of the assets did not follow a single format. Last, on rare occasions values were found misplaced
in a column other than the expected one. Working together with cultural heritage experts and
content creators we studied the data and designed the next steps towards processing them and,
eventually, augmenting them.</p>
        </sec>
        <sec id="sec-5-1-2">
          <title>5.2. Controlled vocabularies</title>
          <p>The next step was to decide where to use controlled vocabularies and which ones. As
mentioned previously, there were already sets of plain text terms in place for assets types and
for building materials. In addition to those, we decided to create or adopt controlled vocabularies
for historical periods, keywords and for the spatial provenance of the assets. Finally, we assigned
to all assets either the objects or the Built environment concept from the Art and Architecture
Thesaurus (AAT)14 as a basic type and we created three Simple Knowledge Organization Schema
(SKOS)15 concepts that represent a type for the reflection questions, the information questions
14https://vocab.getty.edu/aat/
15https://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference
and the answers in our collection.</p>
          <p>The controlled vocabularies were created or chosen as follows:
• We created the asset types based on the preexisting hierarchy and using SKOS. We
extended it to support archaeological sites and monuments and we linked the terms to
others from the AAT.
• The materials vocabulary was also created using the SKOS schema and was based on
the preexisting list of materials. It was linked to terms from the FISH Building Materials
Thesaurus16.
• For the historical periods we thought it best to use the Greek Historical Periods
vocabulary17 created by the National Documentation Center.
• For the spatial provenance of the assets, we asked the experts to assemble a list of
the archaeological sites and monuments in the area of interest. We then checked the
Geonames18 geographical database for corresponding records and created the locations
that didn’t already exist to form the final list of Geonames Features.
• The keywords list was the last one to be created. We ended up with another SKOS
vocabulary linked to a small subset of the ICONCLASS19 vocabulary.</p>
        </sec>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-5-2">
        <title>All vocabularies have labels in both Greek and English language.</title>
        <sec id="sec-5-2-1">
          <title>5.3. Data pre-processing</title>
          <p>As a result of the challenges and issues mentioned in Section 5.1, the simple mapping of table
columns to properties in our data model would not give the desired results. Since the amount
of data was not very large, most of the work was done manually, together with the experts. A
crucial first step completed by the experts was to group the records according to their spatial
provenance, because this information could not be easily derived from the original datatables.
Information about the asset’s discovery was also searched and added to the data by the experts
at this stage. Additionally, some text formatting tasks were completed. The texts for the dating
and dimensions were changed in order to follow the same format and some small grammatical
and format errors were corrected. After that, the mapping to the new data model began.</p>
          <p>First, concept URIs replaced the original values where needed. For asset types especially,
two URIs were added, one for the specific type of asset and another for the general category of
object or site. URIs were also filled in for the spatial provenance, historical period and building
materials of each asset. For the current location of the artifacts, two values were created, one
that retains the original text and another that contains a Geoname Feature URI and corresponds
to the geographical location of the museum or exhibition space in the area of Arta where the
asset is exhibited or stored. No values for keywords were added at this time, since this is part of
the augmentation of the data.</p>
          <p>For the columns corresponding to the dating of the asset, two options were given. If a year
range could be inferred from the textual value, then an edm:Timespan instance was created
16http://purl.org/heritagedata/schemes/eh_tbm
17https://www.semantics.gr/authorities/vocabularies/historical-periods
18https://www.geonames.org/
19https://iconclass.org/
that had as a label the initial chronology textual value and as limits (edm:begin and edm:end)
the years as described in the text. Some basic rules were set for the conversion of approximate
dates, like “early Xth century”, “3rd quarter of Xth century” etc. For all other cases, and as a
fallback for future incomplete inputs, the original text value was left as it was.</p>
          <p>Apart from applying the data model, an initial cleaning and enrichment was also done during
this stage. Small mistakes were corrected varying from grammatical mistakes to corrections of
the asset chronology and additional bibliography was appended. Also, it was decided that the
Wikidata and DBpedia databases will be used as sources for linking to historical figures and
events. The first enrichment of the data with such links was done during this stage.</p>
          <p>After reorganizing the data, as described above, we were ready to proceed with augmenting
the assets documentation.</p>
        </sec>
        <sec id="sec-5-2-2">
          <title>5.4. Augmenting the data</title>
          <p>The process of adding the augmented part of the documentation proved to be the most dificult
and time consuming. It was done manually and involved a combination of research, precision
and inspiration. The participation of both cultural heritage experts and authors was required to
assure the credibility of the information while tending to the aesthetic value of the outcome as
well. All the resulting documentation records are in Greek.</p>
          <p>Before starting to work on the content itself, some general rules needed to be defined and a
strategy to be drawn. First, we wanted the content of the documentation to look uniform to the
visitors of the digital collection. The grammar and spelling should follow the same rules in the
description and interpretation texts, as should the formatting of the titles and the reasoning
behind the choice of keywords. Also, we should avoid long texts and prefer to append this
excess content as answers to information questions. Finally, the texts should be simple enough
to be understood by a wider audience while retaining the scientific facts. To achieve that we
decided to smoothen the strictly scientific and technical parts of the text by adding explanations
for the scientific terms either in parentheses inside the texts or in the form of information
questions.</p>
          <p>The production of the augmented content included formatting the existing texts and writing
new ones. The challenges were many. There was often debate over which facts to include and
which not when a text was growing large. Also, which term to explain and which not and
whether to leave the explanation in a parenthesis or create an information question. One big
challenge was to determine if a text was simple enough or if it needed additional processing.
Another one was to come up with questions that can truly make the recipient reflect on the
connection of their own lives to the past.</p>
          <p>We followed an iterative methodology. In each iteration we selected some assets to augment,
we researched the bibliography about them and the context they belonged to and then continued
to write the interpretation text, transform their documentation, mostly the titles and descriptions,
and added questions and keywords. 2-3 people with background in cultural heritage usually
participated in this stage and 2 more towards the end of the project. The result was evaluated by
other members of the team (up to 10 people), preferably those that did not have good knowledge
of the cultural heritage domain. Their comments and, especially, their questions were noted,
the documentation went through a review, changes were made and then it was evaluated again
until we were satisfied that our goals were fulfilled. Then another set of assets were selected,
transformed, evaluated, reviewed etc.</p>
          <p>By the end of the project, 360 of the collection’s assets were at least partially augmented,
81 of which fully20. 87 include an interpretation text, 144 are linked to keywords and 122 are
linked to questions. Table 1 shows how the questions are shared among the assets and Figure 6
shows how the keywords, grouped by the top concepts of the vocabulary, are distributed.
5.4.1. The RestAPI
The augmented data were stored in a Jena Fuseki triple store21. To allow easier access to it,
we created a RestAPI that exposes the linked data in JSON object format but can also forward
SPARQL queries to the triple store and return the response. The API contains methods for
searching assets or questions and answers based on multiple criteria, for returning assets by
20You can find some examples of augmented cultural heritage assets here:
https://voeska.athenarc.gr/augmenteddoc/items (in Greek language)
21https://jena.apache.org/documentation/fuseki2/
their uri and for returning information about the usage of the controlled vocabularies. Searches
in the triple store can alternatively return only snapshots of the assets, meaning only a few
characteristic parameters, that can serve for displaying in search result lists or in similar
occasions.</p>
          <p>Searches by values from one of our controlled vocabularies take into account the hierarchy of
the terms. When a term is searched the executed query returns the results that match this term
or any term under it in the vocabulary tree. In this way, when this method is made available to
end users through a frontend application, they can still discover all the assets even if they only
use general terms, which may be more familiar to them.</p>
        </sec>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-6">
      <title>6. Augmented documentation in practice</title>
      <p>The augmented documentation created in the context of the Voeska project has been put in
practice in several creative and educational contexts. It served as a basis for the creation of
a variety of digital storytelling experiences, for on-site or remote visits to monuments of the
city of Arta. An example for on-site visit is the mobile application “Letters from the Past”, a
digital storytelling experience which covers diferent eras and provides the possibility to link
cultural artifacts to heritage sites. The core concept is centered around an ancient scribe, who
undertakes the task of writing a series of letters, as requested by his clients. The Letters span over
various time periods and involve a wide variety of people, both fictitious and real: men, women,
aristocrats, peasants, craftsmen, monks, artists, and kings. Each Letter is connected to one of
Arta’s monuments or archaeological sites and to multiple artifacts that are relevant to its topic.
The augmented documentation was a key contributing component for this experience, serving
a double purpose. Firstly, it served as an inspiration to the creator of the storytelling content,
providing direct access not only to the documentation information about the monuments, but
also to an eficient way to directly identify relevant artifacts that can be presented along with it.
The historical context ofered in the augmented documentation, combined with the relevant
keywords could inspire the creation of the fictional letter, whereas parts of monument and
artifacts documentation was ofered as relevant historical information snippets combined with
the letters.</p>
      <p>The augmented documentation has also been used in the context of creative and participatory
digital storytelling workshops, organized in two diferent educational contexts. 39 junior high
students in the classroom were invited to work in small groups to create brief digital exhibitions
following specific themes. The augmented documentation was ofered as material the children
could explore to select interesting objects relevant to the selected theme and re-use the relevant
information in parts of the exhibition. Similar creative workshops were organized in the context
of a digital storytelling course. 6 students worked in 3 groups to create digital storytelling
experiences inspired by the augmentation documentation and working with two specific sets of
artifacts, related to the Ancient Temple of Apollo and the Ancient Necropolis. The augmented
documentation functioned as a source of inspiration for the story theme and plot while at the
same time ofering direct access to the primary source data, thus supporting a creative outcome
based on solid archaeological evidence.</p>
      <p>Finally, apart from workshops we organized interview sessions with teachers of primary and
secondary school in order to present them with the idea of augmented documentation and get
their feedback on ways to use it in education. 16 teachers participated in total and were also
asked to fill in an evaluation questionnaire. Among other comments, teachers argued that this
approach: “ofers a sense of connection of the historical knowledge with the present and gives
teachers a stimulus to create similar activities”, “(ofers) rich content, easy to understand, easy
to utilize”, “stimulates interest and can be used to bring to the surface skills and abilities of
students that are not "visible" in a traditional lesson” and “(is) fun! Learning that will stand the
test of time”. The complete analysis of the evaluation results of the aforementioned evaluation
activities are out of the scope for the present work and will be reported elsewhere.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-7">
      <title>7. Conclusion and next steps</title>
      <p>Creating the augmented documentation has been an adventure. The process was long and
dificult but the results from putting it in practice have so far been more than positive. In our
opinion it ofers the opportunity for cultural heritage institutions to promote their collections
while introducing to the public a view of the artifacts that would be dificult to discover without
help. This view could make them more curious about the past and maybe more wondrous about
their own connection to it.</p>
      <p>In the next steps we plan to work further on the proposed methodology for producing the
content of augmented documentation. Also, we intend to explore the various ways in which
the data model links the assets. We can create user interfaces with advanced search, navigation
and visualization of the data. Finally, we could take advantage of the emergence of AI and large
language models (LLM) to try and make the process of creating the augmented content more
sustainable. For example, a LLM could make it easier to achieve uniformity in the texts and
titles.</p>
      <p>To sum up, augmented documentation aims to make you dream of the past and reflect on
your present. Our wish is that it ofers to a wider public the same inspiration that we felt while
designing it and watching it come to life.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-8">
      <title>Acknowledgments</title>
      <p>The research project “Voeska”, mentioned in this article, was co-financed by the European
Regional Development Fund of the European Union and Greek national funds through the
Operational Program Competitiveness, Entrepreneurship and Innovation, under the call
AquacultureIndustrial Materials-Open Innovation in Culture (project code: T6YBΠ -00323).
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