Interconnecting objects, visitors, sites and (Hi)stories across cultural and historical concepts: The crosscult project

Abstract

Human History, is a huge mesh of interrelated facts and concepts, spanning beyond borders, encompassing global aspects and finally constituting a shared, global experience. This is especially the case regarding European history, which is highly interconnected by nature; however, most History-related experiences that are today offered to the greater public, from schools to museums, are siloed. The CrossCult project aims to provide the means for offering citizens and cultural venue visitors a more holistic view of history, in the light of cross-border interconnections among pieces of cultural heritage, other citizens viewpoints and physical venues. To this end, the CrossCult project will built a comprehensive knowledge base encompassing information and semantic relationships across cultural information elements, and will provide the technological means for delivering the contents of this knowledge base to citizens and venue visitors in a highly personalized manner, creating narratives for the interactive experiences that maximise situational curiosity and serendipitous learning. The CrossCult platform will also exploit the cognitive/emotional profiles of the participants as well as temporal, spatial and miscellaneous features of context, including holidays and anniversaries, social media trending topics and so forth.