Tourism is a major engine of economic growth but at the same time it has a great impact on the conservation of cultural and natural heritage, hence it requires a more careful and advanced management, especially in terms of flows, and is unavoidably linked to the big and open data available. HERIT-DATA project, following these needs, aims to a better analysis and management of anthropic activities and impacts on cultural heritages, by means of ICT technologies and data exploitation, in order to mitigate the anthropogenic impact on cultural heritages and touristic attractors, thanks to a more efficient management of flows, allowing at the same time the discovery of less known cultural treasures on the territories.
The project focuses especially on old towns and sites of particular archaeological and cultural interest, including UNESCO World Heritage Sites. HERIT-DATA will develop, test and transfer a series of tools to collect, generate, integrate, analyze information and transform them into behavioral changes suggestions. The results will contribute among the many to improve and ease the decision-making processes run by public administration & tourism or heritage managing bodies.
A project short video shows all the above main goals, please click on the following link to watch it: "Herit-Data in a nutshell"
Among the 13 project partners, 3 of them are based in Florence, which put the city in a spotlight and being the city center included in the UNESCO world heritages, it has been selected as one of the 6 Herit-Data pilot projects. For Florence this means deepening the use of open, smart and integrated data through an ICT platform (Snap4City) common to the whole partnership and a specific App (FeelFlorence). These tools aim at supporting the tourism streams management by redirecting them in a new holistic and smart way, so to benefit both tourist experience and the cultural heritage environment.
In the following image, an example of dashboard from Snap4City Platform is taken. It represents some of the monitoring activities on traffic flows in Florence: entering and exiting vehicle streams, % of occupied slots in the main covered parkings, % of PM10 in the monitored areas. Data are freely accessible with real-time update through https://www.snap4city.org/dashboardSmartCity/view/index.php?iddasboard=MzAwNA==
