Abstract:

The Internet has become an enormous aggregation of various information sources and services that provide historical and cultural content in a digital form. This content might serve as an effective component of educational work. However, the key challenge is the implementation of a problem-oriented search for relevant information within this data storage that encompasses disparate, partial, and inconsistent fragments of information in order to acquire knowledge based on the semantics immanent to the relations between the aforementioned fragments. The challenge has already resulted in active research that has caused the progress in the field of the so-called smart services. In this paper, we consider some aspects of educational work in the studies of history and cultural heritage. Employing the smart spaces approach we develop a teaching aid to support history and cultural heritage studies at universities in the form of smart spaces services.

Nowadays, the smart space approach is an emerging technology for the creation of smart services to accompany or surround a user in her/his everyday life. A number of recent research papers reveal the effectiveness of the smart spaces approach in the e-Tourism domain that can be (and should be) closely connected with the studies of history and cultural heritage. This approach employs multi-agent, event-oriented methods of service design with central information hub. Each of the agents exchanges information by means of subscribing and publication actions. An important feature of the smart space technology is the use of ontological formats to keep semantically described information and to infer new knowledge from it. This feature brings definite preferences and clear drawbacks. On the one hand, there is possibility to use multiple resources of Linked Data Cloud. On the other hand, semantic resources are hard to create; they need a considerable amount of human expert’s work. This shortcoming is largely manifested in the historical and cultural e-Tourism due to the lack of semantic resources related to local history and culture.

There are numerous tools that problem domain experts can use to facilitate the population of ontology, such as Semantic Media Wiki or Attempto Controlled English. We propose to involve the students in the creation of semantic resources on the history and culture of Latgale (a historical region of Latvia). These resources will be created on the basis of the information system “Latgales Dati”, which has been developed by Latgale Research Institute at Daugavpils University (Latvia). The work of students to populate the system by semantically interconnected information will be organized as a teaching practice within the bachelor study program “History”. The paper describes the aims, principles, and outcomes of the teaching practice in order to share these methodological approaches with other regional universities in Europe.

In addition, smart services created for e-Tourism can be useful in training students whose specialization is historical and cultural tourism. The paper outlines the possibilities to use the services in history studies at Petrozavodsk State University (Russia), where the undergraduate program “Historical and Cultural Tourism” is being implemented. The smart services will help the students to reveal semantic relations between tourist objects, historical persons, sites of memory, etc. As a result, the quality of excursions will be improved.

Keywords:

History, cultural heritage, historical and cultural tourism, e-tourism, smart space services, undergraduate education, teaching practice.