CHIS: A big data infrastructure to manage digital cultural items

In this paper, we describe CHIS (Cultural Heritage Information System), a big data infrastructure that can be used to query, browse, analyze and process digital contents related to cultural heritage from a set of heterogeneous and distributed repositories. CHIS is characterized by the following technical features: capability to gather information from distributed and heterogeneous data sources (e.g., Sensor Networks, Social Media Networks, Digital Libraries and Archives, Multimedia Collections, Web Data Services, etc.); advanced data management techniques and technologies; ability to provide useful and personalized data to users based on their preferences and context; advanced information retrieval facilities, data analytics and other utilities services, according to the SOA paradigm. By means of a set of ad-hoc APIs, and value-added data processing and analytics services, our system can support several applications: mobile multimedia guides for cultural environments, web portals to promote the cultural heritage of a given organization, multimedia recommender and storytelling systems and so on. We discuss the main ideas that characterize the system, showing its use for several applications. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.