An App for smart and community shared approaches to the safeguard of cultural heritage

Mobile technology is becoming more and more popular in cultural heritage tourism, and many institutions have already developed applications (Apps) that can be downloaded on tablet or smartphones. These Apps improve the usual tools (e.g.: web sites, audio guides, and brochures) with location-based services, reading data and image recognition technologies and, at the same time, offer a quick access to the information previously entered into the device. However, the philosophy of these traditional Apps is to consider the users as passive actors. Changing the point of view, we think that the users/citizens can play an active role in using the tools put at the community's disposal by the new technologies. Through the SAVe HERitage App we mean to make the most mobile technology potentiality to supply a useful tool for safeguarding cultural heritage. Through the ongoing App proposed here, the institutions in charge of the protection of monuments can get information about problems affecting heritage in real time and free of charge, so they can put into the practices timely and suitable protection actions. The requirement to make this initiative successfully involves the community to which the heritage belongs; the expectation is that of awakening the public opinion to the protection of monuments and works of art. From a technical point of view, to make the application cross-platform and scalable to different operating systems we use Cordova Phonegap by Apache Software Foundation, by means of which it is possible to develop applications running on Apple iOS, Google Android, Microsoft Windows Phone 7/8, and RIM Blackberry.