The importance of DueMari project in the Integrated Digital Ecosystem of Culture and Tourism of Puglia Region
How the project contributes to strengthen Apulian tourist and cultural assets, from real to digital dimension
Promoting cooperation between the areas of the lower Adriatic and favoring sustainable and seasonally adjusted tourism development through innovative tools is the goal of the Due Mari Project, of which Puglia Region – Department of Tourism, Economy of Culture and Valorization of Territory and InnovaPuglia are partners, together with Molise, Albanian and Montenegrin partners.
In Puglia, the project was made possible thanks to the strong synergy between the Department and InnovaPuglia, the in-house company for the ICT development of the Region, that are working in tandem to design an innovative digital platform that will allow visitors to enjoy, through Virtual Tour 360, cultural and natural assets of the countries involved in the project.
In particular, InnovaPuglia has created a new technological structure to host immersive Virtual Tours and organize them in virtual thematic itineraries that will lead visitors to the discovery 150 Apulian points of interest, identified by Puglia Region according to a strategic methodology and following a detailed mapping of the territory; furthermore, the technological platform for the publishing of Virtual Tours will be hosted in Puglia regional data Center at InnovaPuglia.
In the next phases of the project, the list of representative assets of the region will be increased to include more architectural, cultural and naturalistic assets, from Gargano to Salento, on the coasts and in the internal areas, involving not only the symbolic monuments and UNESCO heritage sites but also small villages and lesser known realities, far from the major tourist flows.
The Virtual Tours 360 will be a technological promotion tool that Puglia Region will use on its institutional channels and will provide with private operators, to make the regional heritage increasingly visible and attractive, all year long.
The platform will be perfectly integrated with all the components of Apulian Digital Ecosystem of Culture and Tourism, that InnovaPuglia, in collaboration with the Tourism Regional Organization Pugliapromozione, has created to achieve the complete digitization of tourism and cultural system and of the formal obligations for public and private operators.
It is a dynamic, open, evolving system that integrates and develops digital tools to connect administrations, municipalities, tourist and cultural industries on one hand, with Apulian citizens, tourists, buyers, journalists, students and operators on the other.
The Ecosystem is constantly incorporating new services and thematic portals and currently presents tools such as: CartApulia (which collects the information sheets of the assets of regional heritage - cartapulia.it), Viaggiareinpuglia (the official website of tourism in Puglia - viaggiareinpuglia.it), PugliaDigitalLibrary (a digital archive rich in multimedia contents added for their value: from cultural heritage to landscape, from cinema to theater, from music to literature - pugliadigitallibrary.it) and DMS (a Digital Management System with data of touristic operators, accommodation facilities etc. - dms.puglia). In the next few months, also CulturaInPuglia will be published, a digital house of all cultural events in Puglia (culturainpuglia.it).