Content annotations in semantic cultural heritage portals commonly make spatiotemporal references to historical regions and places using names whose meanings are different in different times. For example, historical administrational regions such as countries, municipalities, and cities have been renamed, merged together, split into parts, and annexed or moved to and from other regions. Even if ...

Peace is commonly considered as 'absence of war'. Nevertheless, peace the so called 'positive peace' (Galtung, 1996) – implies a lot more than this. It implies the creation of a society based on social justice through equal opportunity, a fair distribution of power and resources, equal protection and impartial enforcement of law, and above all, mutual cultural understanding and respect. Th us, ...

Many cultural heritage institutions are confronted with a big challenge when it comes to adapting the process of registration, annotation and digitization of their collections to meet the new technological demands for providing their collections online with Web and mobile technologies. With limited funding and limited professional resources, annotation is often lagging behind significantly in t...

Virtual Reality is gaining momentum and widespread popularity in the field of archaeology in order to support research, education, preservation and reconstruction of sites and objects of cultural, heritage and religious significance. The recent emergence of the Virtual Heritage Network has also promoted the use of VR and associated multimedia technologies in the field of natural and cultural he...

This paper surveys current notions of social and cultural presence as they may help the evaluation of cultural heritage projects. We argue that cultural heritage requires specialized evaluation, as key issues both connect and separate the aims of presence researchers and cultural heritage experts. To support this argument, three case studies of virtual heritage evaluations are summarized, and r...

Virtual heritage reconstructions usually focus on displaying architecture or artefacts, with virtual humans playing only minor roles. In the real world, however, such places are, or have been, populated. We introduce a virtual crowd into the real-time 3D reconstruction of a complex heritage edifice to increase the realism of the reconstructed scene. We create a virtual population of worshippers...

Introduction Resources-based tourism is often an economic necessity in natural resources-dependent communities. Tikal National Park, located in the Petén region of northern Guatemala (Figure 1), contains an ancient Mayan urban center and was declared a mixed cultural–natural World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1979 (National G...

This article examines the scope for strategies to build natural assets in the hands of low-income individuals and communities. Natural assets include sources of raw materials such as forests and fisheries, and the airsheds, lands, and water bodies that provide environmental sinks for the disposal of wastes. These resources become assets when people have rights to access their benefits. Four str...

Digital archives are one of the pillars of our cultural heritage and they are increasingly opening up to end-users by focusing on accessibility of their resources. Moreover, digital archives are complex and distributed systems where interoperability plays a central role and efficient access and exchange of resources is a challenge. In this paper, we investigate user and interoperability require...