D5.3 RURITAGE Resource Ecosystem
Creators: name: Patti, Edoardo
name: Tamborrino, Rosa
name: Matteo Orlando,
name: Aliberti, Alessandro
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2021

description: This deliverable describes the whole Ruritage Resource Ecosystem (RRE), which is a distributed software platform establishing data ecosystem and open standards for information management aiming at providing different services and applications to address the needs of the different identified end-users. All data are made Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR). The RRE has been designed to be deployed even into cloud systems compliant with the Infrastructure-as-a-Model paradigm. The platform is available online at the URL https://www.ruritage-ecosystem.eu/ The RRE is conceived as the shared digital common environment of the RURITAGE project for the storage, the development and the dissemination of RURITAGE knowledge on Heritage-led regeneration. The RRE hosts and integrates all the RURITAGE digital tools that are Atlas, Decision Support System (DSS), Digital Rural Heritage Hub (DRHH), Replication Toolbox, My Cult Rural Kit, Monitoring platform. To set up, populate and develop the RRE, thus, a strong collaboration with the other tasks of WP5 as well as WP1 (RM actions and Lesson learned and ATLAS), WP2 (Digital Rural Heritage Hub and knowledge sharing methods), WP3 (Replicators Action Plans and main methodology), WP4 (monitoring platform) and WP7 (photo contest photographs, website and dissemination and communication) were established, as they identified the main potential end-users and provided the main requirements for its design and development. In particular, WP1 defined the inputs (information sources, documents types and structure, data visualisation and data management and main semantic organization); WP2 provided the functional approach (community and capacity building approach for end users); WP3 provided Replicators with the needed tools for developing and implementing the Regeneration plan; WP4 registered and made available the results of the monitoring activities; WP7 provided crowdsourcing and communication (photographs collected by photo contest open concourse and further introduction with access from the project web site). The REE is also strictly linked with WP6 since its functioning will be maintained also after the end of the project, thus allowing the establishing and scaling up of the RURITAGE brand. The deliverable also provides a synthetic overview of the tools integrated in the RRE. In particular, it reports more extensively about the RURITAGE Atlastechnical architecture that has been also developed by Polito as part of Task 5.1. The Atlas is a WEB GIS platform with a synthetic and interconnected data representation and management available at the URL https://www.ruritage-ecosystem.eu/Atlas. It includes georeferenced information, a digital archive, a digital library. On the matter of the Atlas, this deliverable is to be linked to the complementary Atlas creative mapping (Task 1.3) with its development in WP1 delivered in D 1.3. ‘RURITAGE Atlas.’ The RRE has been conceived and designed for creating a strong integration of the tools which have been included. Although the tools have diverse finalisations and diverse developers, they re-use data and information developed by the project and made available via RRE. The RRE is designed, in fact, as the integrated digital environment for enabling functionalities of the RURITAGE project. It is conceived within RURITAGE as the main platform where to collect, store, analyse, show, select and use the data collected and analysed and usable information generated within the project for the scope of heritageled regeneration in rural territories. By doing so RRE enables and makes available for all kind of end users the knowledge generated by the research, its methodologies and achievements. RRE creates the shared digital environment for developing, addressing and exploiting the project approach and methodologies among research partners; moreover, it is the digital environment whereother final users can interact for easily grasping understandings on RURITAGE rural areas and actioning their regeneration processes thanks to the data and tools made available. For this purpose, it allows directly access specific and crosscutting functions for visualizing effective systems of data description, exchanging knowledge, supporting decisions, surveying assessing, monitoring and finally replicating the RURITAGE methodology with a proper knowledge. RRE, firstly, has been developed in strong collaboration with all other partners developers of digital tools that have been integrated in the platform. The developer partners are: ALMENDE (DSS), TECNALIA (Replication Toolbox), Plymouth (My Cult Rural Kit), Cartif (Monitoring platform), while the Atlas and Digital Rural Heritage Hub (DRHH) have been developed by POLITO. The guidelines and graphical improvements of RRE to provide a user-friendly access to the RURITAGE digital environment with its functions are under development (Task 5.5) by UNESCO and will be delivered at Month 48 (D. 5.5). All these partners are the contributors of this deliverable. RRE, secondly, with its shared digital environment has capillary supported the project development through its diverse development in its WPs since its beginnings and will continue to provide this support through the maintenance. Beyond the technical and the facilitator partners, the main users of the RRE are the Replicators (Rs) and also the Additional Replicators (ARs) and the Additional &amp; Digital Replicators (A&amp;Rs) as well as the Role Models (RMs). Facilitator partners, Rs, ARs, A&amp;DRs, RMs are the main test-bed for this platform and its functions to be made available to all kind of end users. During the development, we adopted the Agile methodology [2]. Agile is an approach to the project management which helps to respond to the unpredictability of building software through incremental, iterative work cadences, known as sprints. Agile development methodology provides the opportunity to assess the direction of a project throughout the development lifecycle. It does it through an iterative cycle to build and test followed by an assessment by the user/business until they are satisfied with the product. Thus, by focusing on the repetition of abbreviated work cycles as well as the functional product they yield; agile methodology could be described as iterative and incremental. Thus, following this methodology, software components of the RRE are periodically updated for bug fixing and/or new feature release. For this reason, T5.1 will guarantee the maintenance of the whole RRE, by ensuring consistence and usability of the platform across the whole duration of the project. A quality check on the integrity of the data will be performed, also considering that new data will be continuously generated and processed by the various tools of the ecosystem. The maintenance will include stability and resiliency checks performed on the distributed software infrastructure. The deliverable is organized as follows. Chapter 4 describes the RRE distributed software infrastructure as a whole. Chapter 5 introduces the main ICT enabling technologies i) to develop the RRE platform, ii) to store heterogeneous information into flexible databases and iii) to share information among the actors in the systems by exploiting standard data-formats. It is worth noting that such technologies are agnostic w.r.t. the specific dataset and information to be post-processed, stored and exchanged. Chapters 6 to 11 introduce the main interoperable software components developed for the different tools in the RRE. Finally, Chapter 12 provides the concluding remarks.