Involving end users to create software supporting visits to cultural heritage sites

Abstract

Cultural heritage provides a great legacy that more and more people should experience and appreciate. Information and communication technologies may contribute to increasing awareness in cultural heritage. In the last few years we have developed several applications aimed at supporting visits to cultural heritage sites. Such applications depends very much on the visitors they address, the devices they are implemented on, etc. In this paper, we illustrate the design approach we have adopted, which takes into account an end-user development perspective in order to allow different stakeholders to contribute to the design. The Cultural Heritage Resources (CHeR) model, encompassing all the entities involved in the design process, including the stakeholders, the digital resources to be shown, the different types of visitors, the relationships between these entities is described. It is at the basis of a software framework that has been developed to allow different stakeholders to contribute in the design of the final application. It is shown how this framework is used to create engaging applications in cultural heritage.