Promoting Cultural Tourism across Mediterranean Countries through ICT technologies: The Daedalus Project

Abstract

In the whole tourism industry, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have a great impact as they can provide very effective ways for the diffusion of information, promotions, and business transactions. They are of great benefit also for cultural heritage tourism where they can efficiently support the promotion of cultural heritage sites. The Daedalus Project, a Pilot Project under the EC Eumedis Programme has been initiated with the main objective to enhance the development of the countries in the Mediterranean area by setting up a new e-business model in which the cultural patrimony of each specific community will be promoted by a centralized structure and integrated with all the tourist services available. At present the countries involved are Italy, France, Greece, Cyprus, Israel, Jordan, Tunisia, Turkey, but the system will be open to all countries belonging to the Mediterranean area. Daedalus is organized in three main areas of activities: Network Infrastructure, for the network design and implementation; Content Organization and Delivery, for the definition of methods for collecting and accessing all cultural and tourist data; Business and Local Service Centres, for local activities of training and promotion. The project is in progress: the system architecture, content organization and business model are fully defined, whilst the Daedalus centralized structure will be in operation by June 2006.