Exploiting Pompei Cultural Heritage: The Plinius Project

Abstract

Enlarging and improving the fruition of national cultural heritage is becoming a crucial goal for many nations, obviously including Italy, which owns the larger set of ancient findings of the world. The Plinius project1 is part of this goal. In particular, it concentrates on the archaeological heritage of the Pompei site with a twofold objective. On one side, it aims at allowing different classes of users to enjoy and exploit the Pompei cultural heritage, by providing them with a suite of personalised tools, whose features address the different needs of the various user classes, ranging from the archaeologist to the casual visitor. On the other one, it intends to retrieve and reengineer the outcoming of a previous twenty-year old software projects, which stored and catalogued a huge amount of information about Pompei findings into a legacy system, based on an obsolete hardware architecture. In this paper we introduce the Plinius project by briefly describing its context of use, the user classes, the system architecture and functionalities.