Picture War Monuments: Creating an Open Source Location Based Mobile Platform

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Contents:

  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Related Work: location-based services 2.1 Location-aware display of content
  • 2.2 Contributing content by end-users
  • 2.3 QR codes
  • 2.4 Browsing using an augmented reality application
  • 2.5 Location-Based Games and Geocaching
  • 3. ‘Picture War Monuments’
  • 3.1 Challenges in designing the application
  • 3.2 The Drupal backend
  • 3.3 The mobile and on-line front-ends
  • 4. Future work

This paper describes the development of the ‘Picture War Monuments’ mobile platform. The goal of this platform is to enrich visits to war monuments by providing contextual data from a range of institutional repositories and other information sources. In section 2 the authors discuss five types of location-based services using GPS. Distinguishing the several features of location-based services proved helpful in defining the functional specifications. The design of an open source content management system that connects content from different platforms takes the recommended (interactive) features per user group into account. This resulted in a mobile (presentation provides insight into the development of the “Picture War Monuments” mobile platform) and a Web front end (Erfgoed In Beeld) that provide historical content in a meaningful context. As the current technology that is available for location-based services has no unambiguous target group, the flexibility of the platform and the enabling of user-generated content was necessary to turn the process of creating meaning into a fluid conversation.The project, funded within the Images for the Future national digitization programme, was coordinated by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, in close collaboration with the Dutch National Committee for May 4th and 5th, the Dutch National Archive, the EYE Film Institute and the Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD).

Richly illustrated, interesting article describing the project’s experiences in developing a useful mobile content platform to visitors of war monuments in the Netherlands.