An IoE Architecture for the Preservation of the Cultural Heritage: The STORM Use Case

Introduction

Preservation and protection of Cultural Heritage (CH) have always attracted the attention and interest of many parties (e.g., academics, researchers, local or domestic communities or private companies and the public sector) due to its historical, touristic and economic potentials. Recent advances in areas of computer science, especially the rapid growth of Cloud Computing and the Internet of Things (IoT), has been the driving force behind great developments and applied techniques, while the solutions proposed in this paper can be considered as equally efficient, for the preservation and protection of our Cultural Heritage. The use of (many kinds of) sensors can facilitate communications through their collected data to a database that can be located locally (i.e., edge of the network) or in the cloud (i.e., core of the network), where it can be accessed by various registered individual experts, is considered as a potential basic scenario in a modern Cultural Heritage data IoE use case. To perform efficiently, such solutions should follow a well-documented structure, in the form of an architecture, that describes the performance of each entity in a smart ecosystem. The structure of the system will depend on its intended functionality, since there is not a global solution that is adopted generally, but rather referenced ones that are applied with small changes depending on use cases and their needs.

To this end, Figure 1 presents the basic entities of an Internet of Everything (IoE) smart ecosystem, specialized with the goal of safeguarding our Cultural Heritage. In particular, the IoE entities are the following:

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  Things: IoT devices (e.g., sensors) used for weather (e.g., air temperature), environmental (e.g., audio signals) and structural monitoring (e.g., material degradation) of the parameters linked to the risks that the cultural heritage sites face.

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  People: Human-beings (e.g., experts) connected to each other through social networks or crowdsourcing applications.

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  Data: Incoming data (from IoT devices or people) processed to extract useful information and detect hazardous events, in order to make cognitive decisions.

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  Process: The stakeholders are informed in real-time about hazardous events through an emergency management system.

Figure 1.

Internet of Everything for safeguarding cultural heritage