Cultural Heritage Storytelling, Engagement and Management in the Era of Big Data and the Semantic Web

The current Special Issue launched with the aim of further enlightening important CH areas, inviting researchers to submit original/featured multidisciplinary research works related to heritage crowdsourcing, documentation, management, authoring, storytelling, and dissemination. Audience engagement is considered very important at both sites of the CH production–consumption chain (i.e., push and pull ends). At the same time, sustainability factors are placed at the center of the envisioned analysis. A total of eleven (11) contributions were finally published within this Special Issue, enlightening various aspects of contemporary heritage strategies placed in today’s ubiquitous society. The finally published papers are related but not limited to the following multidisciplinary topics:Digital storytelling for cultural heritage;Audience engagement in cultural heritage;Sustainability impact indicators of cultural heritage;Cultural heritage digitization, organization, and management;Collaborative cultural heritage archiving, dissemination, and management;Cultural heritage communication and education for sustainable development;Semantic services of cultural heritage;Big data of cultural heritage;Smart systems for Historical cities – smart cities;Smart systems for cultural heritage sustainability

A Survey of Multimedia Software Engineering

Developing multimedia applications entails understanding a variety of advanced technologies, in addition, multimedia programming poses a significant challenge in terms of handling a variety of hardware devices, multimedia formats or communication protocols. Therefore, break-through software engineering technologies should be applied to produce reference architectures able to support ever-changing requirements. In this paper, we first present the challenges that designers must face in multimedia programming, and how current frameworks address them, specially regarding the management of architectural evolution. We then show what breakthrough approaches or technologies can be used to produce more reusable, extensible and open multi-media systems. We focus on presenting the benefits of applying component-based software development and application framework technologies. We also illustrate how to componentize all multimedia functionalities and (re)use the resulting components as COTS in application frame-works. This approach helps to add multimedia capabilities to an application without requiring specific knowledge on multimedia