The project has built a highly flexible software services platform dedicated to Cultural Heritage venues, which is completed by four mobile applications ecosystem. The platform integrates the CrossCult Knowledge Base, extending the CIDOC-CRM standard, which facilities inter-connections among digital resources and venue collections, enabling semantic-based reasoning, linking and retrieval across disparate data, and data enrichment and augmentation through a formally expressed classification of domain concepts. Our four pilots have demonstrated the potential of the CC platform through the apps ecosystems, and have open new research perspectives on reflection and historic re-interpretation driven by technologies. The Living Lab, by involving has led to gather feedback, co-design and work with external stakeholders, facilitating the application design and the experiments, but also bringing scientific and business contacts during the project.
The project has produced 10 assets with high market potential, for which we have established business and revenues models. A dual licensing is adopted, where open licenses allow free use to ensure the research community can benefit from the project outcomes, and special licenses allow commercial exploitation. In the continuity of the project, each partner either exploits directly a part of the outcomes or builds on the contacts and business opportunities made during the project to build new experiments, projects or services. Moreover, we have designed a legal framework, centered on a non-for-profit organization, to manage the assets created during CrossCult in the future and ensure the sustainability of the project.
Projects outcomes have been communicated through its website (40.422 visits), social media (327 followers on Facebook, 90 members in LinkedIn group, on average 6.6K impressions on Twitter), conferences and journals (around 50 scientific publications) , living lab activities and events organized by partners (35). Today, 16 business opportunities are identified, completed by 30 prospects all over Europe and potentially Africa and America.
During the first year of the project, building blocks have been designed and implemented: scenarios and requirements for the pilots; evaluation framework to assess user experience towards reflection and history re-interpretation; ontological models to describe cultural heritage sites, artifacts, content and knowledge; a preliminary version of the CrossCult service platform (CC Platform) and its components, supported by a professional development environment; a communication and dissemination plan including a Living Lab (LL) framework and a preliminary business study. During the last two years, we have fully developed and documented the CrossCult platform, its services, its knowledge base and its four application ecosystems demonstrators, implemented the four pilots and conducted user studies on reflection and reinterpretation supported by IT technologies, built awareness of the project through scientific dissemination, communication and living lab activities involving meeting and working with external stakeholders, and defined concrete business plans for the future.
