A presentation for a lecture at the Emuni Master in Bari, Italy, 2012, based on a short paper presented at the Université de Limoges, October 2008.

1. Università degli Studi di Bergamo
Centro Studi per il Turismo e l'Interpretazione del Territorio (CeSTIT)
Dipartimento di Scienze dei linguaggi, della comunicazione
e degli studi culturali
Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature straniere
GPS-enabled Mobile Devices
vs. Heritage
Roberto Peretta
Euromediterranean Master in Culture and Tourism
ICT Quality Management in Tourism Communication
April 2011

2. What are we talking about?
A warning from the British Cartographic Society
Map-making revolutionised
Can heritage be “delivered” through PNDs?
PNDs, heritage and tourist destinations
Future issues
Voice as an interface
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3. An authoritative warning
During the 2008 Conference of the Royal
Geographical Society, the President of the
British Cartographic Society, Mary Spence,
issued a warning:
“Internet mapping may be wiping out the
country's heritage”.
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4. Disappear from consciousness!
According to Spence, “the focus of internet
maps on providing driving directions produced
by internet giants has meant that the
whereabouts of the thousands of churches,
ancient woodlands, stately homes and
eccentric landmarks which make up the rich
tapestry of the British landscape could
disappear from public consciousness.”
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5. Map-making revolutionised…
Ed Parsons, Geospatial Technologist at
Google, commented: “The Internet is
revolutionising map making. We’re moving
towards a future where interactive maps will
display precisely the information people want,
when they want it. It’s adding a whole new
dimension, literally, to cartography: now
anyone can create their own maps or use
their experiences to collaborate with others in
charting their local knowledge. In the future,
no two maps will be the same, and this is
something we should embrace.”
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6. Personal Navigation Devices
Spence’s reference to “driving directions”
brings us to the reason why internet mapping
has become so important both socially and
academically speaking.
Internet mapping is in fact the main
information source for GPS-enabled mobile
devices.
The diffusion of Personal Navigation Devices
(PND) like those offered by TomTom, Garmin
or Mio has in fact dramatically increased in
recent years.
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7. Georeferencing vs. heritage
What do GPS-enabled mobile devices
ultimately rely on?
Who provides georeferencing, i.e. the
geographical and topographical
foundations for internet mapping?
Is that provider – or are those providers –
anyhow likely to care about heritage, e.g. by
adding information on heritage to mass-
distributed geographical and topographical
data?
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8. Navteq and TeleAtlas
Today, the GIS data market for internet
mapping and GPS-enabled mobile devices is
basically a duopoly between Navteq, a
company with headquarters in Chicago,
Illinois, and TeleAtlas, a Netherlands-based
company.
Whether “corporate cartographers” from
Navteq or TeleAtlas care for heritage is
another way of placing the question Spence
has raised.
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9. Google vs. tradition
There well may be a “Google-based answer”
to Spence’s call.
Still a source for GIS-based heritage
information, or a bunch of reliable sources
like the old-time national mapping agencies
and geographic societies, might perhaps
continue to exist.
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10. A “heritage-delivering” PND
Not surprisingly, this approach was taken as
early as in 2005 by one of the oldest and
more traditional tourist publishers in the
world, Touring Editore, based in Milan as the
publishing company of the non-profit mass
association Touring Club Italiano, or
Touring Club of Italy (TCI).
Their idea was to market a PND capable to
deliver georeferenced information on heritage
as well as driving directions.
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11. The Navigatore Touring T-370
The Navigatore Touring T-370 was born
around Christmas 2006.
It was a really innovative device. Users could
- and still can - drive (or walk) around and
instantly see which pieces of heritage they
are passing by.
They can also skim through long lists of
pieces of heritage and get directions on how
to reach them.
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12. Heritage routes and POIs
Moreover, the Navigatore Touring allows users
to follow heritage routes across Italy
suggested by the TCI, read descriptions of
both routes and the points of interest
(churches, museums, historic buildings, ... as
well as hotels, restaurants and the like) listed,
and in many instances use pictures of the
points of interest themselves.
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13. Heritage through voice
What’s more, the ability to deliver voice
instructions included by most PNDs was
stretched by the Navigatore Touring well
beyond the common driving directions
functionalities.
Thanks to a Text-to-Speech (TTS) piece of
software, the same heritage content that
users can read on the Navigatore Touring’s
tiny screen can also be listened to, like an
outdoor audioguide.
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14. PNDs, heritage and people
In 2007 the Navigatore Touring was put to
use by the author of this presentation in an
attempt to introduce what looked like the
guest of stone – a missing character, a
forgotten actor, an unsolved problem – in the
dialogue among mobile devices, heritage and
people, i.e. tourist destinations.
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15. A workshop in the Lakes area
In 2007 a group of ten students, two lecturers
and a senior professor from the University of
Bergamo made contact with two local
communities in the Lakes region – a well-
known tourist destination in Northern Italy –
and had local experts (museum curators,
archaeological surveyors, official tourist
guides) lead them throughout their own
territory interpreting it under a heritage
approach.
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16. Tracking heritage
All along such heritage-compliant guided
tours, two Navigatore Touring devices were
used in order to georeference the visited
points of interest – a number of which were
off the beaten tracks, hence not
geocodable – as well as to trace the paths
that the party followed.
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17. Destinations, heritage, PNDs?
The rationale was to test whether a tourist
destination can – if its community and its
experts cooperate with young scholars – enter a
heritage-compliant content aggregation process
as far as GPS-enabled mobile devices (not
simply tourist paper guidebooks or brochures)
are concerned.
The answer was yes.
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18. A European project
More recently (2007-2009), the EU-Latitude
European project successfully tested a similar
approach.
It has been established that tourist
destinations can – if their communities
cooperate with dedicated publishers – enter a
heritage-compliant content aggregation
process as far as GPS-enabled mobile devices
(not simply tourist paper guidebooks or
brochures) are concerned.
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19. Food for thought. 1
Lastly, we’d like to provide some food for
thought about potential developments.
1. GPS-enabled mobile devices and
proximity.
We envision a viable future in which people
(tourists) will be able to get relevant
information on the heritage points of interest
they are physically approaching through their
GPS-enabled mobile phones, by the very fact
they are approaching them.
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20. Food for thought. 2
2. Language issues.
Pieces of text designed to deliver information
on heritage through GPS-enabled mobile
devices should be devised and written in
order to be easily translatable under different
cultures.
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21. Food for thought. 3
3. Management issues.
Aggregation and delivery of relevant
information on heritage bound to be released
through GPS-enabled mobile devices are a
mix of processes, in which traditional
cartographers, internet mappers, specialized
publishers, telecoms and destination manage-
ment organizations (can) all play a role.
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22. Food for thought. 4
4. Ergonomics and usability of mobile
devices.
Due to ergonomic limits that are part and
parcel with mobile devices, this information
on heritage is likely to be delivered less as
readable text than as voice. In the tourist
information world, too, Text-to-Speech – and
possibly its counterpart, voice recognition –
may become more popular than it is today.
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23. Thanks! Any questions?
Università degli Studi di Bergamo
Centro Studi per il Turismo e l'Interpretazione del Territorio
(CeSTIT)
Dipartimento di Scienze dei linguaggi, della comunicazione
e degli studi culturali
Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature straniere
Roberto Peretta
roberto.peretta@unibg.it
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