CUSPIS
Cultural heritage space identification system

The protection, fruition and support of the cultural heritage show evidence of a growing importance in European society, which is particularly rich in cultural assets. The European Commission gives great importance to the subject, promoting actions for protection, improving understanding and dissemination of the culture and history of European citizens, and making cultural heritage increasingly available and accessible. The cultural assets can be seen, as a consequence, as one of the most valuable infrastructures owned by European citizens. The innovative idea behind CUSPIS is to combine the cultural assets infrastructure with another important European service infrastructure: Galileo and EGNOS. Galileo represents a unique opportunity to implement both institutional and commercial applications for the cultural assets protection, valorisation and fruition with value-for-money solutions under the appropriate regulation umbrella. In this context, the benefits coming from the Galileo and EGNOS benefits and differentiators, with respect to a solution based on GPS, are maximised together with the valuable role that a deployed solution can play for this user community.

The CUSPIS project deployed operative solutions for the transportation and fruition of secure assets in open archaeological areas using EGNOS and Galileo. CUSPIS is unique within the cultural heritage user community in merging GNSS aspects, authentication capabilities and infomobility services in a single solution.

Description

The CUSPIS activities have been divided into Work Packages:

• Establish proper user community groups in the cultural asset context, enhancing their awareness of the potential of satellite navigation;
• Provide deep analyse on the issues related mainly to security, management and fruition;
• Identify all potential applications enabled by Galileo services in the cultural asset sector;
• Analyse the potential applications, examining all the elements that can affect the final services involving the key actors of the value chain, including the user community-related ones, and assessing the associated market potentiality and building the service models in order to complete a relevant application scenario;
• Design and develop major demonstrators and a key technological proof-of-concept related to the secure cultural asset management, services for the tourist and authentication;
• Assess and evaluate the results available from the demonstration campaigns; - Perform a business and cost benefit analysis;
• Disseminate the project results via a dedicated CUSPIS portal, organising workshops, participating in conferences and selected national and international events.

Objectives

CUSPIS aims to demonstrate the benefits that EGNOS and Galileo can bring to the cultural heritage user community, with a strong accent on validation of results, economical and technical viability of systems and its dissemination. The goal of the project is to study the current situation in the cultural heritage sector, identifying the areas where innovative solutions, based on satellite navigation services, can prove to be beneficial.

The CUSPIS project will establish proper user community groups, involve significant actors from the relevant community and institutional users, transfer to the cultural heritage world a new awareness of the innovative applications offered by GALILEO, and put an accent on authentication aspects, IPR and Digital Rights Management and European multilingualism.

The key to CUSPIS is the use of the so-called Geo-Time Authentication (GTA) for the unique cataloguing, authentication and determination of the precise location of indoor and outdoor cultural assets. The concept will be demonstrated for secure management, tracking and transportation of cultural assets between various sites (cultural asset management) and provision of information to both tourists and experts in the cultural heritage field (cultural asset fruition).