Virtual Institutions for Preserving and Simulating the Culture of Mount Bego’s Ancient People

The Alps of southeastern France, better known as the Valley of Marvels, hide an impressive collection of engravings, mostly visible on the rocks around Mount Bego, which are irreplaceable witnesses of what life of the people who created them looked like. This calls for immediate action on promoting the awareness of this cultural treasure, which is hardly accessible by interested common men, as well as on helping domain experts to analyze these engravings and share their understanding and theories about them with other experts and the public. In this position paper, we propose a set of technologies (some of which are partially implemented) for digital preservation of available data about the region. Our technology will allow domain experts to: (i) organize and structure data into an existing collaborative tool set, (2) process it, (3) make assumptions about the way of life of the ancient people based on the data, (4) make the results of such activities available in form of 3D Virtual Worlds.