Virtual Campfire - Cultural Heritage Management and Presentation on Mobile Devices Based on Interoperable Cross Platform Mpeg-7 Multimedia Web Services

Smart devices, application mobility, portability, service reliability and data interoperability raise much attention of the international cultural heritage community recently. Web 2.0 and social software turn users into prosumers which results in a great amount of multimedia content and metadata for the community on the one hand. On the other hand, it asks for new concepts to develop better mobile applications for cultural heritage data management. We designed and realized a cross media and cross community framework called Virtual Campfire within the German excellence research cluster UMIC (Ultra High Speed Mobile Information and Communication). It consists of a set of services providing diverse mobile communities MPEG-7 based multimedia content processing services to use heterogeneous data sources. The services include real-time multimedia creation and processing, collaborative semantic enrichment of multimedia content and collaborative storytelling on different mobile devices. Based on such a service oriented architecture Virtual Campfire enables the flexible realization of community information systems with diverse and complex multimedia content such as videos, images and 3D data. The Virtual Campfire prototype realized on the iPhone and Nokia smart phones is able to support documentation activities on-site in cultural heritage fieldwork. 1 MOBILE WEB 2.0 IN CULTURAL HERITAGE MANAGEMENT Technological development in recent years is increasingly driven by issues of ubiquity and interoperability of network technologies, applications, services and devices. Meanwhile, social software turns users into prosumers (i.e. consumers and producers in parallel) anywhere at any time. Due to the Web 2.0 and social software a vast amount of multimedia content is generated. In order to manage these abundant amounts of content it is unevitable to make use of efficient retrieval techniques based on semantic metadata. For (meta)data management in cultural heritage documentation there exists an observable gap between domain specific metadata standards for cultural heritage with limited relation to multimedia description or processing standards such as CIDOC CRM (ISO, 2006) etc. and emerging multimedia description standards such as TV Anytime (EBU, 2009) and MPEG-7 (ISO, 2004) which are not bound to specific application domains. Former attempts (Hunter, 2000, Hunter, 2001, Hunter, 2002, Doerr et al., 2003) to close this gap have been biased by socio-technical issues in research and development processes for information systems in cultural heritage management and by the speed of technical innovations, which lead to the Web 2.0 and ubiquitous computing. Both technical trends are merging into the new mobile Web 2.0. Especially fieldwork in the domain of archeology and cultural heritage preservation has become a major application area for the incorporation of mobile devices in documentation tasks. The growing gap between technical and domain-specific semantic metadata was not only observed in cultural heritage management, but also in other domains (Gladney, 2007, Zhao and Yang, 2005). One path to follow is to create multimedia semantics by gradually enriching technical multimedia metadata with general as well as domain-specific context information. Thereby, context information in multimedia has not only incorporate the widely known spatiotemporal context information in form of GPS coordinates and time/date information but also technical information on devices and software used as well as social context information, e.g. about the creator, his professional status and his professional networks. Here, a second viewpoint comes into play. Nowadays it is mission-critical not only to communicate within a professional community of a certain expert level but also with non-experts. Communication is necessary to raise awareness for cultural heritage management tasks and to incorporate the media production of non-experts into the multimedia discourses of a professional community. Based on this socio-technical approach on mobile Web 2.0 in cultural heritage management the following research questions arise. How can we facilitate a complex professional collaboration with the help of mobile technology and multimedia in semi-public discourses about cultural heritage management? How can we bring together domain experts and non-experts in a community of practice (Wenger et al., 2002) with different requirements concerning security, multimedia processing and domain knowledge? Based on the experiences drawn from intercultural and intergenerational learning explored in the Bamiyan Valley Development case study in section 2 we present in this paper the comprehensive Virtual Campfire scenario of complex collaboration in a mobile Web 2.0 setting in section 3. Details on the web-based and service oriented technical infrastructure are revealed in Section 4. In section 5 we discuss our experiences with the approach so far and evaluate the opportunities and challenges. We conclude and give an outlook to further work in the last section. 2 THE BAMIYAN VALLEY DEVELOPMENT COMMUNITY CASE Before we propose our scenario of applying mobile multimedia services and technologies within cultural heritage communities, we observe individual and collaborative knowledge work in communities of practice on the Bamiyan Development Community, which we have hosted since 2005. Operating a community portal is an effective way for long-term digital information preservation, while community activities can monitor and guarantee secure accessibility of digital cultural heritage (Gladney, 2007). The common interest of the Bamiyan Development Community is the preservation and development of the Bamiyan Valley in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. The valley is located in the heart of the Hindu Kush Mountains and is perhaps best known for the tragic demolition of the two Giant Buddha statues by Taliban extremists in March 2001. The Bamiyan Valley with its archaeological remains has been listed among UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites since 2003. Its long term preservation can have a major impact on sustainable tourism and economic development for the entire region. But the destruction of the country’s cultural heritage by the Taliban went much further. The destroyed Buddha statues are only the tip of the iceberg. More than 20 years of military conflicts in Afghanistan caused the destruction of national science structures and historic archives. By moving large parts of the paper based archives and cultural collections out of the country, scientists and professionals fleeing from the war scattered expertise and knowledge all over the world. The generation of scientists and professionals trained and working before the war is now reaching retirement age. Figure 1: ACIS in the Bamiyan Development Community Portal Since almost no preservation work was possible for about three decades in Afghanistan during the periods of conflicts, the problems to manage today are manifold. Currently, many Afghan scientists and professionals trained in other countries return to their homeland in order to help rebuild academic structures and management infrastructure in the cultural heritage sector. While the elder scientists and professionals have personal knowledge about the condition and precise location of sites and monuments from before the war, young scientists and professionals use modern information technology and new scientific methods to augment their knowledge. In order to bring both generations together, they need a channel to communicate and cooperate. We have created a community portal at http://www.bamiyan-development.org in order to initiate the international and intergenerational cooperation in this matter. The spatiotemporal multimedia database ACIS (Afghan Community Information System) for cultural heritage management is fully integrated into the portal (cf. Figure 1). ACIS has initially been designed as host for data of the national inventory on sites and monuments of Afghanistan (Klamma et al., 2005). With the integration into the community portal collaborative production and dissemination of various types of media (photos, videos, drawings) can be realized with the help of the ACIS community members. Individual community members have contributed trailer videos to support the community idea and attract further interest of the public. Interviews with heritage experts on the preservation of Bamiyan are shared via the portal. An example may illustrate the professional work in the community. Various researchers, engineers and other professionals record the condition of the niches of the destroyed Buddha figures in the Bamiyan valley during a campaign. The applied measurement technologies cover high-end 3D laser scanning and stereometry as well as common devices such as GPS enabled camera systems. All material including digital images with additional stored GPS coordinates can be requested by a mobile multimedia database on a laptop of a researcher. The international community can retrieve and access materials with the help of the community information system presented later. Members can collaboratively tag and even reuse media in other documents by using recombination or embedding techniques. However, media are only released to the public after a careful approval by community experts. After successful approval, they are ready for being shared with the public using tools such as flickr or YouTube in order to raise interest for the restoration work in the Bamiyan valley. Figure 2: Detailed ACIS view on a cultural heritage site We can draw the following conclusions from operating the community portal. Non-experts are interested, but need a clear agenda for participation (draw also on experiences from Wikipedia). Experts are concerned about quality and accuracy of the collected material to be made available following the rules of a distinguished security. Media are only retrieved and presented to users with sufficient access rights. Lessons learned are listed in Figure 3 in form of a SWOT analysis.