RICH: Research and Innovation for Cultural Heritage

This paper describes RICH: a new architecture conceived and developed at the Scuola Normale Superiore, for collecting, promoting and sharing cultural heritage data. Starting with the observation that cultural heritage is a cross-cutting field of research where needs are often poorly integrated with each other, a new architecture is required, aimed at solving this integration issue. RICH provides a first step in this direction by addressing several needs in this field through state-of-the-art technologies such as 3D vision and virtualization. The paper outlines the principal building blocks of the architecture by planning and explaining each step in terms of functionality. We also report some preliminary experiences that are being carried out using this architecture.