Informatica 40 (2016) 457–461 457
Motivating Cultural Heritage Artifacts Presentation Using Persuasive
Technology
Jernej Vičič
Faculty of Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Information Technologies
University of Primorska
E-mail: jernej.vicic@upr.si
Tine Šukljan
Faculty of Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Information Technologies
University of Primorska
E-mail: tine.sukljan@upr.si
Keywords: mobile application, persuasive technology, cultural artifacts, cultural heritage
Received: October 27, 2016
We have developed an information system in the scope of a project for the preservation and popularization
of architectural heritage. The system aims at promoting archaeological tourism and contains a mobile ap-
plication and an interactive on-line application. The mobile application guides the user on a pre-prepared
learning paths and draw attention to the points of interest in the vicinity. At each point of interest it pro-
poses to the user a choice of the level of information, he wants to learn. The user is motivated using
persuasive technologies. The backbone of the system is a web server which serves as a main entry point
for adding paths into the system and as a feeder of the data for both the mobile and online application.
Povzetek: V sklopu projekta za ohranitev in popularizacijo arhitekturne dediščine smo razvili informacijski
sistem. Sistem, namenjen spodbujanju arheloškega turizma, vsebuje mobilno in spletno aplikacijo. Mo-
bilna aplikacija vodi uporabnika po v naprej pripravljenih učnih poteh in ga opozarja na arheološki točki
v bližini. Na vsaki točki, aplikacija ponudi uporabniku izbiro, koliko informacij želi o posamezni točki
izvedeti. Uporabnik je motiviran k obiskovanju predstavljenih točk s prepričljivimi tehnologijami (persua-
sive technologies). Hrbtenica sistema je spletni strežnik, ki služi kot glavna vstopna točka za dodajanje
poti v sistem in kot pošiljatelj podatkov tako mobilni in spletni aplikaciji.
1 Introduction
In the area of the Roman maritime villa and its background
there is an extensive web of specimens of cultural and nat-
ural heritage of immense value nationwide. The archaeo-
logical site of “Simonov zaliv” (The Bay of St. Simon) was
first mentioned in the 16th century. In the past years some
activities were conducted for the valorisation and promo-
tion of the site; since 2010 the University of Primorska,
specifically the Institute for the Mediterranean Heritage
of the Science and Research Centre is responsible for the
management of this monument (owned by the Municipal-
ity of Izola). The Project AS – Projekt Arheologija za Vse,
Project Archaeology for All1 – tries to establish a modern
archaeological park through these steps:
1. restoration, conservation in protection of the archaeo-
logical site Simonov zaliv;
2. education and training in the field of archaeologi-
cal didactics and enhancing public awareness on the
meaning of archaeological heritage;
1Project Archaeology for All: https://www.project-as.eu/
sl/
3. enhancing and improving the accessibility of the mon-
ument;
4. planning tourist itineraries connecting archaeological
sites of the Slovene coast, thus enhancing the appeal
of this particular area in the segment of archaeological
tourism.
The last two steps propose, among other activities, cre-
ation of an interactive on-line and mobile platform that en-
hances archaeological awareness and supports archaeolog-
ical tourism. This paper presents the latter. A mobile appli-
cation that guides the user through prepared archaeologi-
cal paths with the accompanying server framework that en-
ables input of paths and materials for each site. The server
framework serves the mobile applications with new data on
demand.
The paper is organized as follows: motivation is pre-
sented in Section 3 followed by the description of the
methodology used in design and implementation of the pre-
sented system described in Section 4. Section 5 summa-
rizes the achieved goals and presents a typical use-case.
Section 6 discusses the results and presents the future work.
458 Informatica 40 (2016) 457–461 J. Vičič et al.
2 State of the art
Persuasive technologies [1] and Gamification [2] in partic-
ular was used to
A critical review of the gamification trend in tourism,
the concept of gaming and gamification, intrinsic and ex-
trinsic motivation of gamification elements and benefits of
gamification are presented in [3]. A set of best practices
of the application of games and gamification concepts, to
create innovative products and services for the travel and
tourism industry is presented in [4] and in [5]. A similar
approach using gamification with geographical maps is the
Geocaching initiative with a big community [6].
3 Motivation
The application will guide the user through existing and
new walking and cycling routes, which are established in
the Municipality of Izola and surroundings. User’s atten-
tion will be focused to the fascinating natural and cultural
points of interest along the way, with an emphasis on cul-
ture. The app will offer a good addition to the existing cy-
cling and walking infrastructure trails (a few such tracks are
described on the web and printed leaflets), and form the ba-
sis for possible further development of the entire network
of trails. The application will alert the user to the point
of interest and offer a choice of three levels of information
enabling information presentation according to user’s inter-
est. Textual information will be supplemented with visual
and video materials. The application will be distributed via
the Internet or in the park – the starting point of the archae-
ological site. Three routes are currently prepared:
– circular walkway San Simon – Strunjan (a combina-
tion of P13 and P14 routes from the Slovenian net of
hiking rotes),
– circular cycling route San Simon – Korte – Baredi
(K16 - cycling route),
– route visiting Izola’s cultural monuments (walk
around the city).
4 Methodology
4.1 Requirements
These were the requirements at the start of the project:
– Mobile application that supports the two most used
mobile platforms:
– Android,
– iOS;
– Ability to get new paths with no installation process;
– Seamless updates;
– Simple installation process;
– Simple, yet powerful object administration, possibly
using on-line applications;
4.2 Point of interest
The points of interest (POI) were selected by te experts
(historians and tourist guides), multimedia and text materi-
als were gathered for each POI. We opted for a three-layer
textual description accompanied by a gallery of images and
an optional gallery of videos.
4.3 System architecture
The architecture of the whole system is presented in Fig-
ure 1 with the web page (web server) as the integrating
part. Mobile application is installed from the web page or
from the application store (Google PlayStore2 or the Apple
store3). The mobile application "AS" retrieves new paths
from the web server. The paths with the accompanying ob-
jects are prepared and monitored from the Heritage Infor-
mation Catalogue – HIC [7] and all changes are automati-
cally propagated to the web server and the mobile apps.
Figure 1: The architecture of the whole system with the
web page as the integrating part.
4.4 Interfaces
The communication between system entities relies on an
open REST API[8]. The answers to the API requests are in
2Google Play store: https://play.google.com/store
3Apple App store: https://www.appstore.com/
Motivating Cultural Heritage Artifacts Discovery. . . Informatica 40 (2016) 457–461 459
JSON[9] format. An example API call with the resulting
reply is shown in Figure 2.
API request:
https://www.project-as.eu/api/path/get_paths
Reply:
[
{
"name":"Prva izolska pot",
"id":0
},
{
"name":"Druga izolska pot",
"id":1
}
]
Figure 2: An example API call with the resulting reply.
The paths with all data describing the archaeological
sites (the images and videos are linked as urls linking
to the Project AS web page) are encoded in standard
GEOJson[10] and can be exchanged with other services.
The first implementation of such service is our web page
that displays the same data as the mobile applications. Part
of such path is presented in Figure 3.
{
"type":"FeatureCollection",
"features":[
{
"type":"Feature",
"properties":
{
"name":"Izola 2",
"time":"2016-09-09T12:35:51Z"
},
"geometry":
{
"type":"LineString",
"coordinates":[[13.647916316986,45.533476766486], ...
Figure 3: Part of an actual GEOJson encoded path.
4.5 Heritage Information Catalogue
One of the goals of the HIC project was the construction
of a publicly accessible multipurpose platform for storage,
management and sharing of natural and cultural heritage
artifacts. The system was populated with more than 4000
objects. A new interface for path definition and a new set
of API calls for path management added to the existing in-
frastructure for the purposes of the Project AS. An example
usage can be observed on Figure 4.
4.6 Web page
The web page is based on a proprietary Content Manage-
ment System – CMS[11] Build Your Own CMS – BY-
Figure 4: An example usage of the HIC platform for the
input of heritage artifacts.
OCMS4, developed by the CORA Centre at the Univer-
sity of Primorska. It relies on open source technolo-
gies: AngularJS[12] for the single page app web devel-
opment, CodeIgniter[13] for the backoffice development;
MySQL[14] for the storage and Apache[15] as the web
server. An example web page is presented in Figure 5.
Figure 5: An example web page for the AS project.
.
4.7 Mobile application
Seamlessly download new paths and inform the user of
new possibilities. We opted for a non aggressive approach
meaning that the paths are downloaded only at the appli-
cation start and at a user intervention – by clicking of the
appropriate button. Scores are synchronized in the event of
a path correction, the path statistics is also updated at that
event. All technology for mobile application is based on
JavaScript language and Node.js library, more specifically
on the module npm from Node.js library that allows the
4BYOCMS: http://cora.iam.upr.si/en/byocms
460 Informatica 40 (2016) 457–461 J. Vičič et al.
developer an easy setup of the initial development environ-
ment on any (UNIX) operating system. We prepared the
final version of the development environment, based on the
Ionic environment [?] that is based on libraries Cordova[?]
and AngularJS. Such an environment enables applications
implementation for the two most widespread mobile plat-
forms. The same code was used to set up the application on
the website. The code is the same, but the functionality is
limited partly because the web application is not intended
as an on-field tools. It is designed to offer rapid overview
of the offered paths that can be later visited by the mobile
application.
4.8 Motivation using persuasive technology
The technology has been used in many tasks to persuade
people and motivating them toward various individually
and collectively beneficial behaviors. There are two domi-
nant conceptual paradigms: persuasive technology [1] and
the more recent gamification[2]. For the purposes of this
paper we will use persuasive technologies and rely on stud-
ies such as [2] despite these differing titles, the conceptual
core of both paradigms incorporates the use of technology
that is aimed at affecting people’s/users’. The concept of
gamification is defined as the use of game design elements
and game thinking in a non-gaming context [16]. Moti-
vation is a central topic in gamification as gamified sys-
tems are implemented to change behavior for wanted and
desirable activities, in our case the user involvement into
historic artifacts discovery. Extrinsic motivation focuses
on applying game elements into a non-gaming context to
stimulate external motivation. Second, game thinking and
motivational design has a positive influence on intrinsic
motivation as it is done because of an internal desire to
play [?]. The main goal of the mobile application is to
engage the user into active discovery of the architectural
heritage of the presented area. Three paths were prepared
in the scope of the project till now and a few are still in the
progress of development. The user is involved into active
discovery through persuasive technology [1]. The user is
collecting virtual rewards (treasures) by visiting the prede-
fined sites along the path. The application is keeping score
of the found (visited) sites and produces reports about the
progress of the journey. The final objective of the applica-
tion is to collect as many as possible objects from the path
resulting in visiting all the sites presented by the path.
5 Results
The platform presented in 4 with the accompanying appli-
cations and the multimedia materials were made as one of
the actions of the Project AS. The platform was created
with the upgradability and updating as one the most impor-
tant criteria. Three paths with the accompanying objects
were prepared at the moment of writing this paper and new
objects are already prepared. The system as presented in
4.3 is deployed and being used on a regular basis. The paths
with the accompanying objects are prepared and monitored
from the "Heritage Information Catalogue". The mobile
app will be available for download from the project web
page or installed from the Google Play Store and the Apple
App Store.
5.1 Typical use case
A typical use case would involve a visitor intrigued by the
invitation from the web page, installing the mobile appli-
cation. The application presents a map that guides the user
along the path. The user follows the path on the application
from an artifact to the next and earns involvement points.
The application also follows basic statistics such as the per-
centage of the visited path, the percentage of found artifacts
along the path. A non-completed path viewed from the mo-
bile application is presented in Figure 6, new entries are
being added to the path in the time of writing of this paper.
Figure 6: A non-finished path from mobile application, ad-
ditional elements will be added later.
6 Discussion
Persuasive technologies and gamification have been used
quite frequently in tourism applications the last few years.
Massive communities have formed around gamification
systems such as Geocaching. A mobile application imple-
menting gamification techniques has been developed fol-
lowing these findings. The application is still in testing
Motivating Cultural Heritage Artifacts Discovery. . . Informatica 40 (2016) 457–461 461
phase, the local testers (project members) were very inter-
ested in the usage and happily finished the presented tasks
(receiving virtual presents - gaming points). The presented
system is already deployed and first test installations were
already done. The starting programming and interface er-
rors have been addressed and the application with the un-
derlaying platform will be made available to public in the
next months. Three paths have been constructed at the
moment and test users have already used the application
through the paths (they managed to collect all the virtual
treasures). All three tracks are fully accessible, no obsta-
cles have been found on the test runs. The mobile app is be-
ing registered to the application stores. The whole frame-
work can be used for new applications, the input system
was designed to describe all natural and cultural heritage
artifacts, the open APIs and standard interfaces allow easy
data sharing, the mobile application can be upgraded with
new paths with no need for additional installation.
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