Interactive Experience Design: Integrated and Tangible Storytelling with Maritime Museum Artefacts

Museums play the role of intermediary between cultural heritage and visitors, and are often described as places and environments for education and enjoyment. The European Union also encourages innovative uses of museums to support education through the cultural heritage resources. However, the importance of visitors’ active role in museums as places for education and entertainment, on the one hand, and the growing and indispensable presence of technology in the cultural heritage domain, on the other hand, provided the initial ideas to develop the research. This thesis, presents the study and design for an interactive storytelling installation for a maritime museum. The installation is designed to integrate different museum artefacts into the storytelling system to enrich the visitors experience through tangible storytelling. The project was conducted in collaboration with another PhD student, Luca Ciotoli. His contribution was mainly focused on the narrative and storytelling features of the research, while my contribution was focused on the interaction- and technology-related features, including the design and implementation of the prototype. The research is deployed using a four-phase iterative approach. The first phase of the research, Study, deals with literature review and different studies to identify the requirements. The second phase, Design, determines the broad outlines of the project i.e., an interactive storytelling installation. The design phase includes interaction and museum experience design. We investigated different design approaches, e.g., interaction and museum experience design, to develop a conceptual design. The third phase, prototype, allows us to determine how to fulfill the tasks and meet the requirements that are established for the research. Prototyping involves content creation, storyboarding, integrating augmented artefacts into the storytelling system. Th final phase, test, refers to the evaluations that are conducted during the aforementioned phases e.g., formative and the final usability testing with users. The outcome of the research confirms previous results in the literature about how digital narratives can be enriched with the tangible dimension, moreover it shows how this dimension can enable to communicate stories and knowledge of the past that are complex, such as the art of navigating in the past, by integrating tangible objects that play different roles in the storytelling process

Documenting, Interpreting, Publishing, and Reusing : Linking archaeological reports and excavation archives in the virtual space

This PhD thesis examines how application of 3D visualization and related digital analytical tools is having a transformative impact on archaeological practice via improvement of visual-spatial thinking and the strengthening of conceptual understanding. However, the deployment of these new digital methods is essentially still at an experimental stage. Therefore, the thesis undertakes a critical evaluation of current progress, identifying both shortcomings and opportunities. It argues that more work is needed to systematically identify and resolve current operational challenges in order to create improved digital frameworks that can strengthen future performance across the wider discipline.The PhD research is based on four “parallel experiments” designed to facilitate mutual enrichment and on-going refinement. Each individual experiment generated research articles, which investigate how particular 3D and digital methods can be adapted to diverse kinds of archaeological sites and features,each with unique characteristics. The articles demonstrate how particular methods can be deployed to constantly refine and improve documentation procedures, and to review and adjust interpretation during the excavation process. In total, the thesis produced five research articles and three new web-based publishing systems.Overall, the thesis demonstrates that application, proactive evaluation and constant improvement of new 3D visualization and digital analytical tools will play an increasingly significant role in strengthening and better integrating future archaeological methods and practice. The research also generates original insights and new digital platforms that together underline the importance of applying these new digital tools across the wider archaeological discipline. Finally, the thesis cautions that digital innovation needs to be anchored in an "open science" culture, including strong ethical frameworks and commitment to FAIR principles (i.e. Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability) of data archiving as a key component of research design and wider societal engagement

Learning technical genres – a blended learning approach

Research studies dedicated to the application of blended learning in modern linguistics are on the rise. With the interdisciplinary nature of science and curricula, researchers are combining traditional methods with contemporary digital sources and text processing tools. Regardless of the many methods and approaches recommended, there is no set methodology widely proven to be successful, due to different student profiles, language competences and the learning environment. This paper presents the results of the blended learning approach taken at the University of Montenegro’s Faculty of Maritime Studies in Kotor. The traditional teaching approach has been combined with genre and discourse knowledge, with the support of digital and internet tools. The goal of the research is to demonstrate that students of the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course may benefit from genre- and linguistics-based knowledge applied in the technical and digital environment. Moreover, it is argued that a corpus- and genre-based approach to teaching professional genres provides an opportunity to enrich ESP classes. This approach has primarily proved to be beneficial in teaching technical and engineering genres. Language precision is the essence of effective language competence

Movement Analytics: Current Status, Application to Manufacturing, and Future Prospects from an AI Perspective

Data-driven decision making is becoming an integral part of manufacturing companies. Data is collected and commonly used to improve efficiency and produce high quality items for the customers. IoT-based and other forms of object tracking are an emerging tool for collecting movement data of objects/entities (e.g. human workers, moving vehicles, trolleys etc.) over space and time. Movement data can provide valuable insights like process bottlenecks, resource utilization, effective working time etc. that can be used for decision making and improving efficiency. Turning movement data into valuable information for industrial management and decision making requires analysis methods. We refer to this process as movement analytics. The purpose of this document is to review the current state of work for movement analytics both in manufacturing and more broadly. We survey relevant work from both a theoretical perspective and an application perspective. From the theoretical perspective, we put an emphasis on useful methods from two research areas: machine learning, and logic-based knowledge representation. We also review their combinations in view of movement analytics, and we discuss promising areas for future development and application. Furthermore, we touch on constraint optimization. From an application perspective, we review applications of these methods to movement analytics in a general sense and across various industries. We also describe currently available commercial off-the-shelf products for tracking in manufacturing, and we overview main concepts of digital twins and their applications

Semantic Search and Discovery for Earth Observation Products using Ontology Services

Η πρόσβαση σε δεδομένα που έχουν προέλθει από την παρατήρηση της Γης παραμένει δύσκολη για τους περισσότερους απλούς χρήστες μέχρι και σήμερα. Οι υπάρχουσες μηχανές αναζήτησης απευθύνονται σε ειδικούς του πεδίου παρατήρησης της Γης, αδυνατώντας να καλύψουν τις ανάγκες επιστημονικών κοινοτήτων από άλλα πεδία, καθώς και απλών χρηστών που δεν είναι εξοικειωμένοι με τα δεδομένα παρατήρησης της Γης. Στα πλαίσια αυτής της διπλωματικής αναπτύχθηκαν σημασιολογικές τεχνολογίες οι οποίες ενσωματώθηκαν σε μια πλατφόρμα αναζήτησης ΕΟ-netCDF δεδομένων. Οι τεχνολογίες αυτές με τη χρήση οντολογιών επιτρέπουν την εύκολη αναζήτηση και πρόσβαση σε δεδομένα που έχουν προέλθει από την παρατήρηση της Γης.Access to Earth Observation products remains difficult for end-users in most domains. Although various search engines have been developed, these are targeted for advanced Earth Observation users, and fail to support scientific communities from other domains, as well as casual users not familiar with the concepts of Earth Observation.In the context of this thesis, we developed semantic technologies that were used to semantically enhance a search engine for EO-netCDF product. We present how these technologies utilize ontology services to substantially improve the ability of end-users to explore, understand and exploit the vast amount of Earth Observation data that is available nowadays

Digital Libraries and Educational Resources: the AquaRing Semantic Approach

Large amounts of scientific digital contents are nowadays held by scientific institutions which collect, pro- duce and store information valuable for dissemination, work, study and research. In this context, the development of the web and of learning technologies has brought new opportunities for teachers and learners to retrieve and share pedagogical objects. This paper introduces the use of a se- mantic approach developed within the EC funded AquaR- ing project with the aim of improving access to the vast amount of digital content concerning the aquatic environ- ment and its resources, as well as supporting enhanced edu- cation and informal learning in this specific domain. In or- der to achieve these goals, a semantic framework and an educational ontology were developed and implemented. Both were used to support the indexing of learning re- sources and to provide several educational services to end- users (especially children, students, parents and teachers). Index Terms—Digital Libraries, Learning Objects, Ontolo- gies, Semantic Web