Technology-Powered Strategies for Sustainability of Cultural Heritage

Dear Colleagues,

Sustainability of cultural heritage is a cornerstone for governments around the world due to its impact in economic development, social inclusion and cohesion, education, tourism and innovation. However, it is jeopardized whenever one of the following two opposites is reached:

• On the one hand, the pressure exerted on popular museums, buildings, archaeological sites or historical city centers –for instance, as a consequence of mass tourism– poses growing challenges to heritage professionals, institutions and stakeholders to protect and enhance the cultural assets as well as the territory around them.
• On the other hand, the lesser-known heritage –which is widespread– oftentimes incurs significant management and preservation costs for the benefit of reduced numbers of residents or visitors; in many cases, especially for the intangible heritage of social minorities, the levels of awareness and visibility are very low, and there are increasing risks that the heritage may be lost in the matter of a few years or decades.

During the last decades, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have revolutionized the ways in which cultural heritage information can be gathered from, managed by and delivered to residents, tourists, businesses, Humanities experts and policymakers. This special issue aims to gather insight into how the latest advances in ICTs can contribute to the sustainability of cultural heritage –both to alleviate the pressure on the popular assets and to increase the preservation and valorization of the lesser-known ones– by empowering any of the aforementioned stakeholder groups. Theoretical papers, technical ones and case studies are all welcome.

The topics of interest include any combinations of strategic goals and enabling technologies. The goals may relate to the following (not an exhaustive list):

• New approaches to fighting information overload in the examination and presentation of cultural heritage information.
• Technology-assisted sensemaking from existing digital archives of cultural heritage information.
• Best practices and innovative methods to develop sustainable and smart approaches to cultural heritage.
• Technological aids for collective memory, placemaking and local development planning.
• Technology-powered strategies to rethink the pedagogy of history and cultural heritage.
• Strategies to stimulate reflection, retention and re-interpretation of cultural heritage, through multi-perspective approaches to the study of the past.

The enabling technologies relevant to the special issue, in turn, include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Knowledge representation and modelling for cultural heritage content.
  • Metadata standards and datasets.
  • Automated reasoning and computational argumentation.
  • Management of multiple viewpoints and uncertain information.
  • Geospatial data and analysis.

• Personalization/recommendation technologies applied to cultural heritage content.
  • Profiling techniques for individuals, groups and crowds.
  • Context awareness.
  • Personalized storytelling.
  • Adaptive navigation and browsing.
  • Group adaptation.

• Crowdsourcing and crowd computing methodologies, tools and case studies.
  • Creativity and collaboration.
  • Social interaction and argumentation.
  • Incentive schemes.

• Interaction with cultural heritage content.
  • Urban and rural discovery.
  • Gamification.
  • Location-based services.
  • Augmented and Virtual Reality.

Prof. Dr. Martín López-Nores
Prof. Dr. Angeliki Antoniou
Prof. Dr. Catherine Emma Jones
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Cultural heritage protection and promotion
• Information and Communication Technologies
• Knowledge representation and modelling
• Personalization and recommendation
• Crowdsourcing and crowd computing
• Sensemaking and placemaking