smARTworks: A Multi-sided Context-aware Platform for the Smart

Museum

Salvatore Biondi, Vincenzo Catania, Salvatore Monteleone, Maurizio Palesi and Davide Patti

DIEEI, University of Catania, Italy

Keywords:

Internet of Things, Smart Museum, User-experience.

Abstract:

The technologies characterizing the Internet of Things domain allow realizing smart environments based on

user-oriented localized services. In the last years, IoT has gradually acquired an important role also in the

Cultural Heritage domain, in particular for Smart Museums, through the introduction of several solutions

aimed to ensure immersive and interactive cultural experiences. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Sided

Platform called smARTworks which relies on smartphones localization capabilities and Beacon devices to

automatically provide the user with multimedia contents related to nearby artworks. Moreover, the solution is

able to collect users’ opinions to provide a series of methods useful for the management of cultural items.

1 INTRODUCTION

The spread of the Internet of Things and other related

paradigms in everyday life is leading to a constant ef-

fort to introduce computational and communication

capabilities in everyday objects, which are increas-

ingly turned into smart objects (Kortuem et al., 2010;

Perera et al., 2014; Catania et al., 2012): objects able

to interact with each other, with the surrounding phys-

ical environment, and with people. These interactions

can be enhanced exploiting the information coming

from contextual data and, in particular, taking into

account the position of all the involved entities. In

facts, smart objects may adopt common indoor/out-

door localization technologies such as GPS and Blue-

tooth Low Energy (BLE) to be localized in scenarios

ranging from the Smart Home (Jiang et al., 2004) to

the Smart City (Nam and Pardo, 2011).

In the last few years, IoT is gradually acquiring an

important role also in the Cultural Heritage domain

valorizing artworks by means of innovative techno-

logical applications that create an interactive user ex-

perience able to reduce the distance among “cultural

things” and people.

Recently, several innovative approaches have been

adopted, the most relevant of which include the use of

headphones or robots for an immersive fruition of art-

works, supported by smart-phone applications to col-

lect opinions, wishes, and users’ suggestions.

This paper proposes smARTworks, a Multi-Sided

Context-Aware platform aimed to enhance the user

experience while visiting a museum, an archaeologi-

cal site, or the monuments in a city, and to simplify the

process of information retrieval connected with the

discovery of nearby artworks. The smARTworks plat-

form exploits widespread GPS and BLE technologies

available in personal devices, i.e., smart-phones, sup-

plying an application which exposes artworks multi-

media contents.

1.1 Motivating Example

In order to involve more users and, above all, young

ones it is necessary to provide for a signiﬁcant tech-

nological improvement to ensure immersive and inter-

active user-experiences within cultural environments.

We here propose to analyze an use case to validate the

spread of IoT platforms within cultural spaces such as

museums and archaeological sites.

This solution aims to increase the interest toward

the Cultural Heritage domain according to the IoT vi-

sion. The introduction of new technologies does not

necessarily include a massive use of invasive and ex-

pensive instruments and, to further reduce infrastruc-

tures’ costs, it is possible to limit the use of additional

devices. For this reason, this work proposes the use

of widespread devices such as smart-phones to gather

information and multimedia contents about the art-

works within the surrounding environment.

Let us suppose that Sam is visiting a museum:

thanks to the smARTworks application, Sam is able to

retrieve the list of works in his nearby. In this way, he

Biondi, S., Catania, V., Monteleone, S., Palesi, M. and Patti, D.

smARTworks: A Multi-sided Context-aware Platform for the Smart Museum.

DOI: 10.5220/0006907301030109

In Proceedings of the 8th International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Embedded Computing and Communication Systems (PECCS 2018), pages 103-109

ISBN: 978-989-758-322-3

103

can evaluate artworks details, included audio, video,

and texture multimedia contents.

In the case that the cultural environment includes

totems, TV or image projectors, it is possible to ex-

ploit them in order to enhance users’ experiences, in

support of sharing information.

During his visit, Sam is also able to express opin-

ions, writing comments or putting ”likes” related to

the artworks he has seen. These pieces of information

are collected to provide data to Decision Support Sys-

tems (DSS) for the management of the cultural site

and of the artworks it hosts.

The remainder of this paper is organized as fol-

lows: 3 depicts our proposal with regard to the sys-

tem architecture, 2 presents the state of the art for

what concerns IoT solution within Cultural Heritage

domain. Finally conclusions are drawn in 4.

2 RELATED WORK

The term Cultural Heritage refers to a plethora of tan-

gible and intangible elements regarding the culture of

a group or a society (Vecco, 2010). Since most of

these elements are linked to a physical place or area,

the focus of the proposed work has been moved on

the enhancement of the environments connected to the

Cultural Heritage. These environments are, for exam-

ple, museums, archaeological sites, and cities. Sev-

eral solutions aimed to provide smart services within

the Cultural Heritage environments have been pro-

posed in literature (Chianese and Piccialli, 2014; Chi-

anese and Piccialli, 2015; Mighali et al., 2015). In

general, working with smart environments requires to

face several challenges, in particular, localization of

entities and proper exposition of services.

The most common localization techniques rely on

computer vision (which analyze images and tags), au-

dible sounds and ultrasounds, wireless Local Area

Network (WLAN), RFID, and Bluetooth technol-

ogy (La Delfa et al., 2016; Liu et al., 2013; Mandal

et al., 2005; Mainetti et al., 2014). Among the others,

the RFID technology is mostly placed within Smart

Museums. For example, in (Wang et al., 2007) Per-

sonal Digit Assistants (PDA) manage the sharing of

multimedia contents, with the support of RFID tech-

nology to uniquely identify each artwork and localize

the user. The RFID technology is also adopted within

the Smartmuseum solution (Kuusik et al., 2009) to

enable the tracking of activities together with ad-

ditional technologies such as mobile Internet, Geo-

localization, and NFC. As suggested by this solution,

the user is equipped with a mobile device to retrieve

cultural contents according to his context and posi-

tion.

Nevertheless, the use of RFID technology in smart

museums is subject to some limitations: just as an ex-

ample, not so expensive RFID-based solutions require

a short distance among users and tags associated to

cultural items.

Since the management of smart museums and/or

archaeological sites represents an important open

challenge, several systems able to support users

within these environments were proposed in litera-

ture (Kuusik et al., 2009; Chianese and Piccialli,

2015; Alletto et al., 2016).

A recent vision which involves concepts and tech-

nologies typical of web of things and social networks

has been proposed to enhance the world of smart ob-

jects (Catania et al., 2012; Atzori et al., 2014). In

line with these concepts, authors of (Amato et al.,

2012) propose a Social Network of Object and Per-

sons (SNOPS) framework to create a network of in-

terconnected people (e.g., citizens and tourists) and

objects (e.g., machines, ediﬁces, and rooms).

To support this vision, in recent years, the low-

power version of the Bluetooth standard, namely

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), has been exploited in

indoor localization systems, since its low-cost tech-

nology is available in most of end-user devices (such

as mobile phones, laptops, and desktops computers)

and it is also easy to integrate in objects ranging from

simple tags (called beacons) to the more complex em-

bedded systems.

Indoor Location-Aware systems based on BLE are

proposed in (Chianese and Piccialli, 2014; Chianese

and Piccialli, 2015; Mighali et al., 2015; Alletto et al.,

2016) to bring museums into the IoT paradigm. In

these works authors combine computer vision algo-

rithms, BLE-based localization services, and wear-

able devices to deliver multimedia content related to

the artwork observed in a speciﬁc moment by users.

Other systems based on BLE technology have been

proposed in (He et al., 2015; Frasca et al., 2015) to

share artworks-related multimedia contents.

All the works described above require an expen-

sive (in terms of time and cost) setup. In contrast with

them, this paper proposes an simple and effective plat-

form that includes, other than the use of BLE Bea-

cons, a simple Sensor layer thought to easily main-

tain BLE Beacons data. Furthermore, the platform

here introduced, combines the use of BLE technol-

ogy with the capabilities of users’ smartphones and

the CDWA Lite standard to realize an unambiguous

DB to describe artworks, enabling the interoperabil-

ity and scalability of the platform itself. The CDWA

Lite schema is an XML schema to describe core

records for works of art and material culture, based

PEC 2018 - International Conference on Pervasive and Embedded Computing

104

Table 1: Comparison of main Smart Museum Solutions.

Solution Indoor positioning Outdoor positioning Support to DSS CDWA Lite

(He et al., 2015) IBeacon No No No

(Frasca et al., 2015) BLE Beacon No No No

(Chianese and Piccialli, 2015) BLE Discovery/Advertising No No Yes

The Narrator (Ali, 2014) Wi-Fi No No No

(Yoshimura et al., 2017) Bluetooth tracking system No Yes No

(Mighali et al., 2015) BLE Landmarks No No No

smARTworks BLE Beacon GPS Yes Yes

on the Categories for the Description of Works of Art

(CDWA) and Cataloging Cultural Objects (Stein and

Coburn, 2008).

Table 1 reports a comparison among some Smart

Museum solutions that have in common several fea-

tures with our proposal. This table compares different

solutions, focusing on differences in terms of Indoor

and Outodoor positioning technologies, APIs and/or

dashboards able to support DSSs, adoption of the

CDWA Lite schema, and availability of code sources.

3 SMARTWORKS

ARCHITECTURE

The smARTworks platform is thought to provide ed-

ucational visits according to user’s context and pref-

erences by means of widespread devices (i.e., smart-

phones). These device exploit a centralized architec-

ture, depicted in 1, which exposes ”Artworks as Ser-

vices”.

Then, the smARTworks smart-phone application

highlights the most interesting artworks, with the goal

of optimize the quality and duration of each visit.

Through this application, a user can also choose to

view multimedia contents related to nearby artworks

and express opinions such as ”likes” and textual com-

ments. These ”likes” are very meaningful to build

statistics aimed to the maintenance of cultural envi-

ronments. For example, an artwork that has attracted

more interest than others, could be supported by ad-

ditional elements such totems or image projectors in

order to improve the quality of experience.

Furthermore, the proposal involves the use of BLE

Beacon devices to localize items within a Cultural

Heritage environment. During the deployment phase

the transmission power of these Beacons is regulated

to reduce coverage overlapping.

In the following subsections, an overview of plat-

form’s layers is provided to detail the architecture of

the proposed system.

3.1 Sensor Layer

The ﬁrst tier in the architecture is represented by the

Sensor Layer. This Layer manages all the Beacons

able to cover the considered environment. Through a

conﬁguration phase, each Beacon’s Identiﬁer is linked

(with an one-to-one relation). In this way, the BLE

broadcasting process allows users to recognize an art-

work and to retrieve proper pieces of information and

multimedia contents.

3.2 Service Layer

The Service Layer includes all existing services con-

nected to the network, and enables the management of

artworks within the cultural environment. Each sin-

gle service is able to give a ”Virtual Sense” of an art-

work and to handle the related information. In facts,

a Database containing entries’ descriptions (in JSON

format) can be queried. In particular, Table 2 shows

some artwork’s features such as, id, indoor and out-

door coordinates, and URIs of multimedia content,

stored in the DB.

Built in line with RESTFul paradigms, the service

exposes several managing APIs for cultural items.

Below, has been listed a series of the most relevant

functionalities provided by Services.

• Method for the association of single artwork to a

speciﬁc beacon.

• Method for the update of the artwork’s descrip-

tion.

• Method for the addition of multimedia content as

Video o Audio.

• Method for the retrieving of the artwork’s infor-

mation.

These functionalities, with other, are described by

means of a JSON Template, which aims to give details

of RESTFul request like type, request and response

parameters. Practically, this template aims to describe

the Service interface which has an high important in

communication process between the Service and the

Engine. For this reason, Template information are

maintained in a Database accessible from the Engine

smARTworks: A Multi-sided Context-aware Platform for the Smart Museum

105

Service Layer

Sensor Layer

Id Artwork 1 Id Artwork 2 Id Artwork n

RESTFul API

Presentation layer

Artwork 1 Artwork 2 Artwork n

DB Artworks’ Description

Engine

DB Artworks’ Template

Figure 1: smARTworks Architecture.

Level. According with architectural requirements, it

is possible to select until two type of implementation

patterns: the ﬁrst, which needs a single Service for

each artwork(one to one), and the latter that provides

a single service able to manage more artworks reach-

able from different URI.

3.3 Engine Layer

The Engine represents the core of the platform. As

central part of the architecture, it covers several tasks

including the collection of user context’s information

and the production of a list of artworks. Therefore,

the Engine aims to share the artworks’ descriptions

towards smart-phone application as response to an in-

coming request. In details, the implementation of this

layer is in line with the RESTFul paradigms, and it

equips the platform with a series of APIs, includ-

ing functionalities for the management of opinions

and afﬂuence related to users and artworks. In line

with results obtained, the managers can take decision

aimed to increase the quality of visits. In order to give

a complete vision of Engine capabilities, a full list of

functionalities is reported below:

• Management of users’ proﬁles.

• Retrieval of JSON descriptor for a speciﬁc art-

work

• Retrieval of artworks’ information.

• Management of comments and LIKEs for a spe-

ciﬁc artwork

• Retrieval of statistics information for each art-

work(number of likes, number of user that express

interest for artworks).

• Retrieval of statistics related to afﬂuence.

In addition to these functionalities, the Engine

take-charge of communication with all Services aim-

ing to retrieve cultural items’ information.

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Table 2: Artwork’s Attributes.

Attribute Description

Id The artwork identiﬁer

IndoorPosition The ID related to the Beacon

OutdoorPosition A geometric polygon representing the area that contains the artwork,

represented through a GeoJSON format

ObjectWorkTypeWrap Wrapper of work type information

TitleWrap Wrapper of title information

DisplayCreator Creator information

CultureWrap Information about art movement

Images Array of Images’ URIs

Videos Array of Videos’ URIs

Audios Array of Audios’ URIs

Tags Keywords useful for categorizing artworks

3.4 Presentation Layer

The presentation layer includes applications aimed to

provide a User Interface (UI) that allow to exploit the

functionalities of platform. For example, a smart-

phone application is able to give an overview of the

surrounding environment in term of services and mul-

timedia contents linked to artworks. Is important to

highlight the use of a Dynamic User Interface (DUI)

to generate the appropriate graphical interface for the

cultural item. The notation chosen to represent this

description is SWAGGER. The DUI block is essen-

tially a java-script script which transforms the SWAG-

GER deﬁnition of the artworks into an HTML page

which contains the appropriate User Interface.

Furthermore, in order to supply functionalities for

supporting managers decisions, an DSS dashboard ca

be equipped with graphic instruments built on top of

Engine layer.

3.5 Artwork Description

The structure of descriptive JSON ﬁle follows the

CDWA Lite schema(Stein and Coburn, 2008). Thus,

the CDWA Lite element set consists of twenty-two

elements of which nineteen are for descriptive meta-

data, tree for administrative metadata and only nine

are required. A main characteristic of the CDWA Lite

format is the division of the descriptive metadata in

display elements on one hand, optimized for presen-

tation purposes, and indexing elements, optimized for

retrieval on the other hand. Indexing elements, as they

usually should refer to authorities for actors, places,

or to controlled vocabularies, are provided with at-

tributes for storing a respective URI (termsource and

termsource ID), assuring the identity of a term in a

larger context.

The use of CDWA standard allows to introduce the

smARTworks platform within exiting environments

that hold CDWA Lite description database. For this

reason, a converter module has been developed, and

generates a conversion from XML format to JSON

format.

An example of User interface generated by DUI

is depicted in 2. In particular, this picture shows the

UI as result of a speciﬁc use case, which involves the

use of a service named Artwork-service. This service

is able to give information related to several artworks

by means of a Database that includes several JSON

descriptors. Therefore, we have assumed to localize

”il David di Michelangelo” sculpture by means of a

Beacon device, accompanied by a JSON descriptor

object that include two multimedia contents (image

and video).

3.6 Setting of Preferences

After the installation process, this phase aims to col-

lect information related to interesting art movements

for users. In particular, the user has available a list

that includes artistic movements, types of artworks

and artists. Supported by this list, the user can select

several meaningful options saved in a JSON object

(Listing 1), in order to highlight the interesting items.

The database of artworks, is queried in order to

retrieve the nearby items that meet the user’s prefer-

ences, through discriminants such as artistic move-

ments, types and authors of artworks. In relation to

a selected item, a series of additional linked artworks

provided, aimed to enhancing the cultural level of the

visit.

Listing 1: Preferences JSON.

Preferences = {

id_us e r : 00232 ,

art_mo v e m e n t s :[ id _ a rt_mo v _ 1 ,

id_art_mov_2 ...] ,

typ e s :[ type1 , ty pe2 ...] ,

artis t s :[ id _ a rtis t _ 1 , id_artist_2

... ]

}

smARTworks: A Multi-sided Context-aware Platform for the Smart Museum

107

Figure 2: HTML Interface as output of DUI.

4 CONCLUSIONS

In this paper, a low-cost system that introduces the

IoT vision into Cultural Heritage environments has

been proposed. The system aims at making the user

experience more interactive taking into account con-

texual information and preferences. It also may help

administrations to better understand which are the

visitor-ﬂows in order to manage exhibitions.

As reported on the table 1, the proposed platform

is able to provide users’ location within an indoor/out-

door smart environment, expose lists of nearby art-

works of interest, and offer APIs to support the devel-

opment and use of management tools such DSSs also

thanks to the CDWA Lite schema thought to maintain

a standard description of artworks.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work has been partially supported by the Ital-

ian Ministry of Education, University and Research

on the “PAC” call funding the “SERVIFY (SER-

VIce FirstlY)” project, ref. PON03PE 00132 1, CUP

B72F14000300005.

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