Net-Agorà

Net-Agorà is a service, accessible by means of applications for fixed and mobile devices, to guide users to discover routes (w-trails) with stops (w-places) and providing o information connected to specific areas(e.g.: metropolitan city of Turin, or Palazzo Madama) using multimedia content(w-media) generated by the community and automatically processed by the system.

At the root of the word Agorà there is the square, i.e. a central place where people gather to talk, share experiences and exchange information. In the same way Net-Agorà intends to provide users with a new way to aggregate`in the places they visit, go often to and love, with the ability to share their own experiences and emotions at a digital location (w-place). Sharing also means discovering: during a travel, or simply by curiosity, a user can explore what is around the most famous and visited places, but also know stories and information on new places, with an always original viewpoint provided by the assets created by other service users. Today every plave in the world can become a virtual square with its information, memories and stories.

Ubiquitous diffusion of Social Networks and mobile technologies have enabled instantaneous sharing of multimedia content on the move. In such a scenario, and considenring the impact of the emotional and affective dimension on a given place, Net-Agorà wants to blend the the social and emotional dimension in the travel experience, by offrring the possibility to examine and share georeferenced content created by service users.

The operation of Net-Agorà is summarised by the figure below.

The components of the Net-Agorà ecosystem are:

1. Members of the Net-Agorà community (right hand side of the figure), can be:
   1. Professional: companies and institutions wishing to promote aspects of their territory, such as
      1. interesting places: squares, buildings, monuments, musea, parks, etc.
      2. businesses: restaurants, hotels, shops, theatres, etc.
   2. Consumer: any user consuming exisiting Net-Agorà assets (no registration) and extending orcreating new ones (with registration)
2. Assets created by community members to share the corresponding experiences
   1. w-trail: sequenze of w-places organied as routes
   2. w-place: structured collections of w-media for specific places
   3. w-media: instances of different types of media: video, images, tezts, CDVS descriptors, 3D models etc.
3. Providers of services
   1. WimTV offering vide ostorage and streaming
   2. Net-Agorà managing users and other asset.

Additionally, w-media associated to every w-place, and therefore to every w-trial, are used to create the video trailer, or an audio-visival preview of what the real place offers.

Il progetto di ricerca INCA è finanziato nell’ambito del POR FESR 2007/2013 della Regione Piemonte con il concorso di risorse comunitarie del FESR, dello Stato Italiano e della Regione Piemonte.