Cultural Heritage Storytelling, Engagement and Management in the Era of Big Data and the Semantic Web

Dear Colleagues,

Cultural heritage (CH) refers to a highly multidisciplinary research and application field, intending to collect, archive, and disseminate traditions, monuments/artworks, and overall civilization legacies that have been preserved throughout the years of humankind. This effort is considered very important for historical and educational purposes, which can be deployed in schooling and training sessions, in science and social/humanistic studies, in artistic expression, and in everyday entertaining environments. Today’s digital media landscape offers innumerous ways for expediting the above processes at both ends, i.e., CH content production and “consumption”, taking advantage of the contemporary networking utilities with the associated augmented interaction capabilities. For instance, many museums and other art/cultural organizations are invested in the development of featured digital applications with appealing storytelling and their online dissemination to engage the audience in featured CH projects. Likewise, the proliferation of mobile devices and services and the vast expansion of so-called user-generated content (UGC) have fueled the digitization of personal CH artifacts and their progressive organizations in larger-scale databases. A typical example in that direction is the Europeana project, which formed specific media archiving and metadata standardization rules for CH institutions and sole users to follow. At the same time, urgent needs for better documentation and management of CH documents have emerged, making it difficult for the average user to be part of such large-scale undertakings.

Today, Semantic Web and Big Data technologies promise to facilitate more straightforward data analysis, information classification, semantic conceptualization, and management automation of multimodal content, which could also be applied for the benefit of sensitive CH sectors. Specifically, these automation layers could work as mediated communication and collaboration mechanisms between corporations and individuals to accelerate the proper launch, maintenance, and sustainability of suitable CH repositories, in favor of all the participants. For instance, many significant personal collections have not yet been detected, captured, fully restored, and documented (e.g., photos, films/movies, other private items, etc.). The development of sophisticated digital crowdsourcing procedures with the necessary technological/interdisciplinary cooperation and support would allow mining, shaping, and making available to the public such unique CH masterpieces. Thereafter, suitable engaging audience practices and models are welcomed to enhance the impacts of heritage initiatives, amplifying the environmental, cultural, economic, and social sustainability of human beings. The current call for papers (CfP) aims at further enlightening the above areas, inviting researchers to submit original/featured research works, related but not limited to the following multidisciplinary topics:

• Digital storytelling for cultural heritage;
• Audience engagement in cultural heritage;
• Sustainability impact indicators of cultural heritage;
• Cultural heritage digitization, organization, and management;
• Collaborative cultural heritage archiving, dissemination, and management;
• Cultural heritage communication and education for sustainable development;
• Art and cultural artifacts recognition;
• Semantic services of cultural heritage;
• Big data of cultural heritage;
• Smart systems for cultural heritage sustainability.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Eng. Charalampos Dimoulas
Guest Editor

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