Project description

The promotion of the tangible Cultural Heritage (CH) represents a strategical asset for the development, the innovation and renewal of the cultural and tourist circuits of the cities of art. However, it's still lacking an advanced ICT platform which could face the CH Data life-cycle taking into account the restoration and safeguarding works necessary to ensure its enjoyment to the public.

SACHER project aims to fill this gap, by creating an innovative ICT platform based on a Cloud Computing infrastructure, fully distributed and open source, able to integrates existing ICT platform at public and private entities, facilitating storage and use of CH data for both specialized users and the public.

The platform will be able to provide unique identification tools and 3D modelling of Cultural Heritage as well as application services that will ensure access, analysis and advanced data presentation.

At the business model level, SACHER will define participative design models to foster creation of new content that will enable the evaluation and implementation of cultural services through the involvement of common users (tourists, citizens) and cultural experts (scholars, researchers, curators).

Thanks to technological support, SACHER aims to organize and generate a permanent ecosystem of actors that can produce new value chains in the production area and collaborative fruition of cultural goods services.

Purposes



https://sites.google.com/a/sacherproject.com/eng/project/NETTUNO.jpg?attredirects=0Courtesy of Comune di Bologna

  • Realize a federated and open source cloud capable of handling Cultural Heritage data thanks to new technologies (smart management);

  • Integrate Cultural Heritage Data available on public and private ICT platforms through applications and services that can facilitate and reduce data management times;

  • Ensure the accessibility of CH data to various types of users (cultural operators, citizens, tourists) through intuitive plugin;

  • Encourage integration of public and private actors working within social entrepreneurship and ICT;

Activities


The SACHER project involves two laboratories of the Emilia-Romagna High Technology Net (CIRI-ICT and Softech-ICT) which will deal with the design and with the technological realization of the platform for the management of the CH data life-cycle.
The SACHER activities will be conducted in collaboration with companies which have big competences in the cloud computing field and in the development and integration of complex services on a wide range (Engineering S.p.a. and Imola Informatica S.p.a.) and with a laboratory highly specialized in safeguard, restoration and maintenance of artistic goods (Leonardo S.r.l).

The SACHER activities will be distributed on three levels:
  • CH data level: SACHER will develop methods and technologies both for the building and for visualization of 3D digital models libraries which will represent drawings, architectonics artifacts and urban systems in order to make them accessible on the web and offline, satisfying standards and quality requisites.
  • Infrastructural level: SACHER will provide a cloud platform characterized by: high interoperability with calculators of any manufacturer without asking specific configurations, elastic infrastructure scaling and services for minimizing the resources used in the various data centers involved, API standardization for the integration and the access to the CH data in federated and distributed environments.
  • Service level: SACHER will deal with the design of new collaborative and creative services (user active participation to the service) for the fruition, safeguard, management and the coproduction of CH data.

Final Results


SACHER, in collaboration with the involved companies, will provide an efficient system for stable documentation over time and will define an operational framework for using 3D models which aims to enhances cultural experiences.

The CH data acquisition, archiving, management and storage procedures and the SACHER cloud infrastructure will be made available to various cultural sector operators by providing new advanced services and operational methodologies characterized by a minimal access barrier to technology and reduced costs of realization and management.

A wide re-usability of the SACHER platform will contribute to the use of European standards such as FIWARE that will be significantly extended by the addition of new standard APIs at the IaaS / PaaS level for capturing, storing and storing CH data, thus creating new business opportunities for SMEs and companies operating in the industry

The platform will be tested in the data management of the Palazzo del Podestà and the Fontana del Nettuno in the city of Bologna.


Courtesy of Comune di Bologna