A Mobile App Supporting Field Trip Organization for Natural and Cultural Heritage Exploration

Mobile tourist guides have great potential to promote Cultural and Natural Heritage but usually do this from a narrow perspective, such as a single exhibition or museum, failing to provide users with an integrated viewpoint of the resources available in a geographical area. The organization of tourist plans might thus be challenging because of the many information sources to be consulted. Current tourist guides also limit users' freedom in building custom trips because they almost fully control the itinerary generation process. Moreover, they fail to recognize that cultural and scientific tours might include both the visit to places and the execution of activities aimed at deepening people's experience through experimental work. This is a limitation, especially for the learning field, which recognizes the importance of practical activities in strengthening students' knowledge and understanding. To address this issue, we developed the FieldTripOrganizer application as a model to create mobile tourist guides that support the design of plans suitable for cultural/scientific tourism. FieldTripOrganizer empowers users to design a trip by helping them select Points of Interest and activities that are relevant to the interests and knowledge background of the people who will participate in the tour. Moreover, it simultaneously provides information filtering, automated scheduling, and user-awareness support to let users compose the itinerary from scratch while being informed about the feasibility of the options that can be included without violating its time constraints. We exploited FieldTripOrganizer to present the Cultural and Natural resources provided by the Geodidalab scientific laboratory located in the area of Ivrea (Piedmont, Italy).