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OpenHeritage: Developing cultural tourism in lesser-known regions

By Salvatore Lusso - February 2003

Salvatore Lusso reports on a project seeking to create a cultural heritage community in lesser known European regions where culture, environment and tourism represent the main resource of the area.

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Introduction

The aim of the OpenHeritage Project is to create a cultural heritage community in lesser known European territories where culture, environment and tourism represent the main resource of the region. The concept is to create a mixed model based on commercial activities (hotels, restaurants, locally produced goods, etc.) and the activities of public bodies. This model would be able to promote the cultural heritage of museums and memory institutions at local and international level. Such a sustainable economic model is seen as the only way to change an historically poor system into a winning, added value one.

Figure 1: Front page of the South Sardinia TSC Web site

This community will refer to a local Territorial Service Centre (TSC), an IT infrastructure and service provider that will:

• provide technologies and services to local museums and memory institutions, to allow access to their collections
• host a local territorial web portal for the promotion of the area, (organising tours involving for example museums, local beauty spots and similar attractions, restaurants, hotels, shops selling local products,etc.) at local and international level, through affiliation to the major European tourist organisations
• provide marketing services and business models to promote a continuous process of regional development for local public bodies (which often have plentiful funds for such development programmes but often lack the feasible proposals and concrete projects with which to further them). Their objective therefore is to drive forward a continuous process of regional development and so create job opportunities

The TSC will assist visitors towards a full appreciation of the environment visited which may be considered an open museum possessing a distinctive cultural identity thanks to the landscape and its particular environmental features.

Description of the Service

The core of the service is the creation of a TSC acting as catalyst in the area, among memory institutions, public bodies and private companies (hotels, restaurants, shops, entertainment, car rentals agencies and event promoters such as theatres, cinemas, galleries, municipalities, cultural associations, sport clubs, etc.). This will operate in such a way as to create a strong network of contacts and offer visitors a great variety of opportunities. Its visibility will also be promoted at international level by means of a TSC local web portal which will provide:

• comprehensive and interesting information on collections contained in the regionial memory institutions, events and local facilities
• cultural tours and the option to customise them
• booking services ( hotels, restaurants, etc.) or links to them (for flights and car rental reservations, etc.)
• e-commerce services (to buy local products)
• community services (to promote services of other networked TSC's, a meeting point for information, dissemination and communication between memory institutions, thanks to the sharing of information activities and ideas that TSC portals will present)

The main task of the project is to concentrate upon the widespread cultural and environmental heritage, especially in regions more remote from the better-known tourist centres. One should emphasise that the region as a whole will be considered as an open museum where the landscape and environmental features will emerge as a distinctive cultural entity.

Figure 2: Chief factors in a TSC

Accordingly for every service that requires this kind of approach the portal will employ new technologies and tools available on the market to permit users to experience and appreciate the site they are visiting. Such services might include, for example, the description and visualisation of cultural tours, precise directions to a museum hosting an event, the precise location of the region's TSC, etc.

These new technologies will offer two different levels of user interrogation capability:

• a global vision, based on geographic information and displayed in large scale, that will coordinate the traditional cartographic representation (thematic maps) with a striking 3D-explorable illustration of the area, developed from either aerial or satellite mapping together with photographs and a numerical altitude profile (Digital Terrain Models)
• a greater level of detail that will also provide interactive exploration, with the option of zooming onto specific aspects of the area and on cultural highlights, all supported by further information via hypertext links

Figure 3: Users can interrogate 3D landscapes

Planned Service Provision

We would preface this section with the recognition that the intended service is not yet fully structured nor complete.

We have produced a scenario describing what a typical tourist does before visiting a country, including whether he or she decides to go there ultimately or not.

On the one hand there are vertical or horizontal portals for hotel reservations, created by commercial organisations which by their nature do not attach great importance to the promotion of the region with regard to either environmental or cultural opportunities for visitors. These portals assume that prospective tourists have already firmly decided upon their destination, and provide relatively little information on what they will be able to do or visit. In other words they provide few opportunities for visitors to plan their tour or other related activities in advance.

On the other hand there are tourist portals created by public bodies, which are often full of institutional content on places of interest in the area such as monuments, churches, museums, etc. The problem is that this content is not always displayed in an appealing manner for tourists. This is often because such public bodies are unaware of a few fundamental marketing strategies that would actively leverage promotion of the region's assets. Consequently one rarely comes across suggested or customisable tours, videos showing the region as a whole or places of interest in particular are rare, as indeed is any form of virtual tour.

Figure 4: 3D reconstruction of a site of interest

What a Web site should do is to encourage the potential tourists' curiosity such that they will actually choose to visit these places of interest. In the proposed itineraries there will be the chance to contact restaurants typical of the region, shops selling local products and also reserve hotel or other accommodation.

We realise that commercial organisations have not designated many resources to the creation of models for the integrated promotion of the tourist region since by their nature they are more oriented towards attracting more typical revenue, such as, for example, from hotel bookings. Conversely public bodies interested in the promotion of the region have yet to acquire the expertise in effective marketing and communication that is fundamental in attracting visitors to an area; particularly to less well-known places.

The service will therefore seek to promote the region acting through cultural tourist resources and focusing on areas with low visibility but high potential. This process will make it possible for example to extend the tourist season in certain places (nearly all southern Mediterranean) where the only attraction promoted to date is "sun, sea and sand". If we consider a typical Internet approach, a user will find in the TSC portal, (for example that of southern Sardinia, see Figure 1 above), information on cultural attractions, green tourism, events, itineraries, TSC stores and so forth.

Eventually the Web pages will also contain hypertext links to information on local businesses. Accordingly, having enjoyed a virtual visit and their curiosity aroused, potential tourists are more likely to want to examine suggested tours, restaurants, accommodation, etc. in the portal together with their supporting information. It is more likely, as a result, that potential tourists will become actual ones.

The OpenHeritage Mission

1. The project will analyse 3 test-bed areas in order to assess and evaluate the aforementioned TSC Concepts:
• Sardinia (Italy)
• Rhône-Alpes (France)
• Scotland (UK)
2. Each TSC will focus on:
• socio-economic models of the area in order to understand and realise the value of the resources available
• technologies to be provided to local museums and memory institutions, in order to promote their realisation and business implementation
• a local web portal to give visibility to local resources and services
3. All the TSC's will refer to a Global Portal for the brokering of images from all local museums, thereby granting them a new and unexpected source of revenue

Anticipated Results

The main measurable results expected from the project are as follows:

• Memory institutions will leverage sustainable technology to become agents of the new economy. They will become able to deliver a valuable experience and to compete in the new experiential market; as a result, they will increase the number of visitors and customer satisfaction
• The cultural heritage media assets in memory institutions will render the cultural system capable of supporting itself and financing both subsistence and innovation
• The trend towards the alienation of cultural heritage rights in favour of extra-European economic forces will be reversed and effectively minimised over a 5-year period
• Territorial Service Centres will make technology manageable and will leverage the resources of cultural tourism
• The increase in existing systems, Service Centres and global portals will create a harmonious socio-economic dimension that makes it possible to blend the local and the global
• Since technological innovation is not being pursued for its own sake, but in the framework of a viable strategy that ensures a critical mass, the project will be able to provide significant employment opportunities, (mainly through the involvement of regional not-for-profit organisations developing content according to OpenHeritage specifications) plus much wider access to cultural heritage resources all over Europe

Conclusions

So, the overall focus of the project is on opening heritage to the future through innovation, thus helping memory institutions fulfil their mission; to give the most comprehensive access to their collections not only to coteries of specialists and technologists, but to the largest possible public in Europe where memory and cultural identity belongs. The realisation of local cultural heritage will act as a driving force for the promotion of tourism over the entire region, and will bring about a stronger integration of cultural heritage resources, the environment and the local economy.

The OpenHeritage Consortium

Author Details

Salvatore Lusso
Project Manager
SPACE SpA
Via S. Tommaso D'Aquino n.18,
09100 Cagliari
Italy
Tel: +3907022810305
URL: <http://www.website>
Email:salvatore.lusso@spacespa.it

Salvatore Lusso has a degree in Engineering and a Masters degree in Marketing Strategies from the Polytechnic of Milan in the management of new technologies in companies. He has attended the Train-it course "Turning IST Technology into an investor-winning business plan". He has developed strategies projects for Brandt Group, Artemide, Illy, Piaggio, Ticket Restaurant and Benetton Group. Salvatore has worked for ACCOR Services Hotels (Europe-wide leader in hotels property and services) between Milan and Paris. He monitors market strategies in the Company and is in charge of a number of running projects in the cultural tourism sector, including SANDALYA (with RAS), OPENHERITAGE, CHERI and others.

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For citation purposes:
Salvatore, L. "OpenHeritage: Developing cultural tourism in lesser-known regions", Cultivate Interactive, issue 9, 7 February 2003
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue9/openheritage/>

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