Cultural Heritage Routing: A Recreational Navigation-based Approach in Exploring Cultural Heritage

In recent years, thematic route planning is gaining popularity in recreational navigation. A growing number of people start to use route-planning services to prepare, ride, explore, and log their activities, with a particular focus on where they want to ride and what they want to see. In the context of cultural heritage, however, route planners still suffer from lack of data and route weighting/scoring mechanisms to achieve end-user satisfaction. In this article, we take advantage of mobile sensing and geotagging (r) evolution to tackle both issues and propose a novel framework for cultural heritage routing on top of RouteYou's existing recreational navigation platform. Our first improvement focuses on the automatic collection and multimodal enrichment of thematic cultural heritage points of interest. Second, we introduce a weighting procedure for these points of interest and analyze their meta(data) quality and spatial coverage in our route databases. Finally, we present a novel routing algorithm targeted to cultural heritage exploration. Experimental results show that the proposed framework improves cultural heritage POI coverage and quality with respect to traditional recreational navigation routing algorithms. Furthermore, the proposed framework can easily be used in other thematic routing applications due to its generic architecture, making it a widely applicable approach.