IoT to enhance understanding of cultural heritage: Fedro authoring platform, artworks telling their fables

Cultural Heritage has got great importance in recent years, in order to preserve countries history and traditions and to support social and economic improvements. Typical IoT smart technologies represent an effective mean to support understanding of Cultural Heritage, by their capability to involve different users and to catch their explicit and implicit preferences, behaviors and contributions. This paper presents FEDRO, an authoring platform, as part of the intelligent infrastructures developed in DATABENC to support a cultural exhibition of “talking” sculptures held in the Southern Italy, in 2015. FEDRO aims to automatically generate textual and users profiled artworks biographies, employed to feed a smart app for guiding visitors during the exhibition. A preliminary experimentation revealed a tangible improvement in the users’ experience appreciation during the visit. Quality estimations of generated output were also computed exploiting users’ feedbacks, collected through a manual questionnaire, subscribed at the end of their visit.