**C. For the Creative Industry**


### **D. For research centers**


## **E. For the Economy and Society**

• Improvement of the user experience and enrichment of the means of receiving the artistic/creative result, through his active participation in the interaction in natural and virtual space.

**Figure 7.** *The digital immersive cultural environment (DICE) ecosystem [1].*

#### **Figure 8.**

*Enabling digital creativity ecosystem for the creation of digital immersive cultural environments (DICE) [1].*

• Promoting cultural spaces through the implementation of technologically and artistically perfect cultural events and enhancing the interest of the general public for them.

*SYNTHESIS: A Platform of Platforms for Integrated Management, Curation, and Visualization… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.98213*

• Promoting the collaboration of artists with audiovisual events.

The SYNTHESIS PoP is expected to act as a catalyst in the articulation of a digital creativity ecosystem for enabling the creation of DICE (Digital Immersive Cultural Environment) [1], **Figure 7**. The incorporation of smart contracts and blockchain technology in SYNTHESIS is expected to stimulate the process of crowdsourcing digital artifacts, narratives, and experiences alongside with their visualization, from professionals, as well as qualified non-professionals, in the fields of art, culture and creativity. The embedded protection of the Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) of the digital creator build in SYNTHESIS, and the use of blockchain-enabled Smart Contracts to speed up the contracting and outsourcing process, track revenue streams form the use or sales of digital content, and protect the agreed upon revenue sharing with the creators of the digital content, narrative and experience, are expected to spearhead the process of digital creativity across the entire digital creativity ecosystem as shown in **Figure 8**.

#### **3. Methodology of flexible design and development of technological solutions**

The SYNTHESIS PoP aims to create a coherent platform for the creation of advanced digital assets, the curation of digital objects and their semantic and thematic interconnection through the creation of narratives, and the creation of digital experiences in virtual and real space through the georeferencing of edited digital content and related storytelling, with a range of virtual and augmented reality technologies using tablets, smartphones, virtual reality glasses, and projection imaging technologies.

The SYNTHESIS PoP is based on the coherent integration of existing platforms, services, algorithms, and applications that have been developed in the Integrated Systems Laboratory (ISL) and their effectiveness has successfully been evaluated. The timely and effective accomplishment of SYNTHESIS objectives is largely ensured through the validation of the existing know-how and the possibilities of adopting it in developing solutions for other use cases, similar ot completely new. Technological solutions already developed will be adapted to new requirements and tools already available will be leveraged, adapted as required, and integrated in a coherent SYNTHESIS PoP.

The three platforms SYNTHESIS PoP is made up of, namely wayGoo, SYNTELESIS and AFIGISSI (Narration), are briefly describe in the following. All three platforms have been developed in the Integrated Information Systems (ISL) Laboratory of the Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications at NCSR "Demokritos" through a series of funded projects that are described in the publications [1–10] and acknowledged at the end of the Chapter. The three platforms are:

a.**wayGoo** - wayGoo is a platform for Geolocating and Managing indoor and outdoor spaces and content with multidimensional indoor and outdoor Navigation and Guidance. Its main components are a Geographic Information System, a back-end server, front-end applications and a web-based Content Management System (CMS). It constitutes a fully integrated 2D/3D space and content management system that creates a repository that consists of a database, content components and administrative data. wayGoo can connect to any third party database and event management data-source. The platform is secure as the data is only available through a Restful web service using

https security protocol in conjunction with an API key used for authentication. To enhance users experience, wayGoo makes the content available by extracting components out of the repository and constructing targeted applications. The wayGoo platform supports geo-referencing of indoor and outdoor information and use of metadata. It also allows the use of existing information such as maps and databases. The platform enables planning through integration of content that is connected either spatially, temporally or contextually, and provides immediate access to all spatial data through interfaces and interactive 2D and 3D representations. wayGoo constitutes a mean to document and preserve assets through computerized techniques and provides a system that enhances the protection of your space, people and guests when combined with wayGoo notification and alert system. It constitutes a strong marketing tool providing staff and visitors with an immersive tool for navigation in indoor spaces and allowing users to organize their agenda and to discover events through the wayGoo event scheduler and recommendation system [10]. Furthermore, the wayGoo platform can be used in Security applications and event management, e.g., CBRNE and fire incidents, man-made and natural disasters, pandemics, etc., to document and geolocate information and sensor data (offline and real time) on one end, and offer navigation capabilities in indoor and outdoor spaces. Furthermore, the wayGoo platform can be used for the creation of immersive environments and experiences in conjunction with VR/AR (Virtual & Augmented Reality) technologies [9, 10].


Access to the narratives is possible either during the physical visit to the infrastructure during their regular operation and in extraordinary, periodic or temporary events or remotely. Traditional narrative practices address the development of narrative by placing objects on a linear axis. Instead, the work highlights cultural content with new narrative structures, operating with less strictly prescribed scenarios. In fact, according to new media theorist L. Manovich [17], the database is generally the way to tell a story today. The creation of narratives is achieved in an automated and semi-automated way, by reversing the time axes

*SYNTHESIS: A Platform of Platforms for Integrated Management, Curation, and Visualization… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.98213*

**Figure 9.**

*Schematic representation of the main structural elements of the SYNTHESIS platform.*

and with a variety of thematic grouping options, making a theoretically infinite number of combinations [18], in order to respond to modern perceptions of object multiplicity and the possibility of multiple interpretations. Personalization is done both for individual users and for groups of users who work together to create a narrative. According to the current level of collaborative platform technologies, there are possibilities to connect multiple users for the purpose of a common task [19]. The system allows specialized and non-specialized users to produce stories of various sizes based on the content available and share them with the public. The aim is a holistic approach to storytelling that will lead to mature technology and an innovative tool aimed at the market for (a) the design and implementation of digital collection management software platforms for cultural operators, and (b) web applications, mobile and VR/AR applications for organizations of digital exhibitions and creation of narratives from a registered collection of museums and other cultural exhibits.

In the SYNTHESIS PoP, the three building-block platforms are redesigned, expanded, and integrated into a single controllable and coherent digital creativity environment with the addition of blockchain technology for the protection of IPRs and the introduction of smart contracts for the facilitation of signing contracts for the creation of digital assets, content, context, and experiences, and the verifiable of equitable sharing of revenue streams across the entire creativity chain involved in the creation and visualization of digital experiences, **Figure 9**.

#### **4. SYNTHESIS PoP architecture**

**Figure 8** depicts the Implementation Architecture of the SYNTHESIS PoP. In the architecture, there are three distinct layers: The Data layer, the Business Logic layer, and the Presentation layer. Each layer is made up of various components as indicated in the infographic of **Figure 10**.

#### 1.The **Data layer** supports:

i. (interfaces with) third party databases;

ii.innate to SYNTHESIS databases, such as mongoDB, Neo4j, PostgreSQL, …;

iii. a repository of digital assets; and

iv. a blockchain module for the protection of IPRs and the support of Smart Contracts.

#### **Figure 10.**

*Implementation architecture of the SYNTHESIS platform of platforms.*

	- i. an Application Programming Interface (API) that allows users and end users of the PoP to interface with SYNTHESIS through either
		- a.the Web Portal for the production, curation, management of digital content and the creation of experiences, or

b.the Visualization Applications (mobile and VR/AR);

iii.A Back-end Support System (docker) for dockerizing content;

iv. an AI (Artificial Intelligence) component that consists of two modules:

