Assessing the Role of Cultural Resources as a Key Product for Socio-Economic Development

Post-industrial, knowledge societies need Culture! The various types of culture represent a multidimensional asset largely underestimated, with an extremely powerful potential for socioeconomic growth which is unfortunately still very far from being fully expressed. In this paper, organizational models and technological solutions are proposed as key factors for enabling full expression of an asset that could positively affect several aspects of our life. In fact, if intelligently managed, Culture can provide: • High quality content: the proliferation of new media, like 3g mobile phones or pay TVs, is generating digital spaces that need to be filled with useful and appealing contents. • Socio-economic development: many of the poorest countries host amazing heritage resources that could attract tourists. Cultural tourism is a segment that shows signs of growth all over the world. • Cross-cultural integration: culture is extremely effective for helping people from different areas of this planet in better understanding each other. • Identity building: with the emerging working model based on “boundaryless careers”, it is vital to invest on Culture for building one’s own existential, social, and professional identity. Among the different branches that compose the Culture, it has been chosen to concentrate on the cultural heritage for its intrinsic multidimensional value and its tight connections with one of the leading world industries: the tourism. However, a careful management and wide dissemination of Culture would enhance the fundamental resources of nations. These resources can be organised in two categories of capital: • Human Capital. That is: promoting the creativity of individuals. We define as “creative” sectors like arts, fashion, design, architecture, but also the research of innovation, be it scientific, economic, or technological. • Territorial Capital. That is the territory, its history, landscape, traditions, craftsmanship, and typical products. The Cultural Heritage obviously belongs to this category. The implementation of carefully designed organisational configurations and wisely customised technological solutions can provide the foundations required for allowing the heritage sector in obtaining its right place in the socio-economic scenario. The core issue of this framework is to identify the source of value, that will soon be the main, for cultural heritage institutions that interact with the public, directly or indirectly: the final user

AN IS BASED MODEL FOR EXPERIENCE DESIGN AND MANAGEMENT IN CULTURAL TOURISM

According to Pine and Gilmore [1999], over the last two hundred years we have witnessed a shift from an Agrarian Economy based on extracting commodities, to an Industrial Economy based on manufacturing goods, to a Service Economy based on delivering services, and finally to an Experience Economy based on staging experiences. In the same time span, tourism has evolved from being an elitarian pursuit to being a leading world industry, contributing with over 10% to global GDP (source: WTO). In a fast growing scenario such as the tourism market, if Europe wants to keep its leading position, considering the increasing competitive pressure of emerging countries where labour and raw materials are enormously cheaper, it won’t definitely be through beach, general purpose, tourism. Rather, it will have to leverage on its artistic and archaeological resources that make a visit to places like Rome, Florence or the Loire castles a unique experience. Polls and surveys, however, show that the average traveller is becoming increasingly demanding in terms of information and services: as Shoshana Zuboff points out, people are now more educated, informed, experienced, travelled and connected than earlier generations [Zuboff 2005]. This makes it necessary to invest in R&D for providing tourists with added value, user centred, highly personalized services. In short, memorable experiences. No matter what purpose is behind the project of a trip, travelling is an information intensive activity: variables are innumerable and for transforming a nice idea into a successful trip it is necessary to gather as much information as possible. This, in the age of Internet, can be a hard task: it is well known that extracting useful, meaningful information in an almost infinite repository such as the web, can be an extremely frustrating and time consuming endeavour. Furthermore, each phase of a trip requires different types of services and information. And, last but not least, as Negroponte [1995] noted already over a decade ago, in the post-information age personalization is “upon us”: consumers are now accustomed to be considered as individuals, and “mass” is a synonym of “low quality” in a world where goods, services and, above all, information get everyday closer to their final target’s preferences through increasingly refined customization techniques. A solid point of reference, in this respect, is provided by the Open Tourism Consortium, on the emergence of a multi-faceted uCommerce,. In the proposed model a tour is organized in three phases: pre-, on-, and post-tour. In short, in order to support and promote cultural tourism and heritage, it is necessary to provide both domain experts, and general purpose users with an environment for accessing interactive, personalized, multimedia content through any kind of network and tool, seamlessly switching from one to the other. For reaching this objective it is necessary to cover the whole cultural product life-cycle using techniques and methodologies that range from tomography, to virtual reality, to ontologies, to marketing and customer segmentation techniques with a strong multidisciplinary approach

A Business Ontology for supporting cross border cooperation between European Chambers of Commerce

The recent EU enlargement opens up new opportunities, but poses new issues to be addressed. In particular, in order to enable and support cooperation between firms from different countries, it is necessary to address interoperability issues. The LD-CAST project aims at enabling cross border cooperation between European chambers of commerce (CCs) for supporting the development of private company initiatives. The project objective is to build a European network of portals that will enable end users (mainly private companies) to access in a seamless mode services provided by public organizations registered in each portal. This paper briefly presents a cooperation framework for semantic interoperability mainly based on the following semantic technologies: ontology management, semantic annotation, and semantic search and discovery. Finally the business ontology produced in the course of the project is presented.The recent EU enlargement opens up new opportunities, but poses new issues to be addressed. In particular, in order to enable and support cooperation between firms from different countries, it is necessary to address interoperability issues. The LD-CAST project aims at enabling cross border cooperation between European chambers of commerce (CCs) for supporting the development of private company initiatives. The project objective is to build a European network of portals that will enable end users (mainly private companies) to access in a seamless mode services provided by public organizations registered in each portal. This paper briefly presents a cooperation framework for semantic interoperability mainly based on the following semantic technologies: ontology management, semantic annotation, and semantic search and discovery. Finally the business ontology produced in the course of the project is presented.Uninvited Submission

Open Source e Mercato dei Software ERP: il caso di Compiere/Adempiere

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