Exploring Semantically Interlaced Cultural Heritage Narratives

While traditional mobile guides propose itineraries underlying the presentation of individual narrations, a broad view of Cultural Heritage should take into account that Points of Interests, historical characters and objects are frequently related in different stories linking art, history and science. Moreover, stories could be associated through their common themes. Thus, a focus on individual narrations is not enough to provide users with a holistic view of the places they visit. In this paper, we investigate the presentation of interlaced Cultural Heritage information to make users aware about the connections among such stories. For this purpose, we propose an exploration model that enables the user to take side walks in semantically-related narrations concerning Points of Interest. This is based on a semantic knowledge representation where two types of relations connect entities within individual stories, and stories through their common themes. Based on this representation, we developed the Triangolazioni mobile guide that presents multimedia information about Cultural Heritage in Torino city. A user study has shown that participants perceived the app, and its "side walking" support, as highly usable. Moreover, they appreciated the storytelling capabilities of the app.