Virtual campfire - cultural heritage management and presentation on mobile devices based on interoperable cross platform MPEG-7 multimedia web services

Smart devices, application mobility, portability, service reliability and data interoperability raise much attention of the international cultural heritage community recently. Web 2.0 and social software turn users into prosumers which results in a great amount of multimedia content and metadata for the community on the one hand. On the other hand, it asks for new concepts to develop better mobile applications for cultural heritage data management. We designed and realized a cross media and cross community framework called Virtual Campfire within the German excellence research cluster UMIC (Ultra High Speed Mobile Information and Communication). It consists of a set of services providing diverse mobile communities MPEG-7 based multimedia content processing services to use heterogeneous data sources. The services include real-time multimedia creation and processing, collaborative semantic enrichment of multimedia content and collaborative storytelling on different mobile devices. Based on such a service oriented architecture Virtual Campfire enables the flexible realization of community information systems with diverse and complex multimedia content such as videos, images and 3D data. The Virtual Campfire prototype realized on the iPhone and Nokia smart phones is able to support documentation activities on-site in cultural heritage fieldwork.