Big data meets digital cultural heritage: Design and implementation of SCRABS, a smart context-aware browsing assistant for cultural environments

Information and Communication Technologies have radically changed the modern Cultural Heritage scenery: Simple traditional Information Systems supporting the management of cultural artifacts have left the place to complex systems that expose rich information extracted from heterogeneous data sources-like Sensor Networks, Social Networks, Digital Libraries, Multimedia Collections, Web Data Service, and so on-by means of sophisticated applications that enhance the users' experience. In this article, we describe SCRABS, a Smart Context-awaRe Browsing assistant for cultural EnvironmentS. SCRABS has been developed during the Cultural Heritage Information Systems national project and promoted by DATABENC, the Cultural Heritage Technological District of the Campania Region, in Italy. SCRABS has been designed on top of a Big Data technological stack as the result of a multidisciplinary project carried out by a heterogeneous team of computer scientists, archeologists, architects, and experts in humanities. We describe the main ideas that support the system, showing its use in some real application scenarios located in the Paestum Archeologica Sites.