Testaccio app for iPhone and iPad

Testaccio is an urban district within a stone’s throw from the historical centre of Rome. It houses a number of famous Classical monuments, such as the Cestian Pyramid and the Monte Testaccio. In ancient times the area was the river harbour of the city. In the early 20th century it was covered by blocks of flats, accomodating the labourers, so crucial to Rome’s city development.

Modern Testaccio is an urban landscape in flux, which poses major challenges to its built heritage, especially when viewed in its broadest sense, including Classical monuments as well as industrial buildings and ‘palazzi’. How can the tensions between heritage management and urban renewal be resolved? Can history and heritage contribute to sustainable social and economic development? These and other questions are central to the Testaccio project.

This App is part a scientific experiment which was held in June 2013 in Testaccio, Rome. The aim of the experiment was to measure the impact of historical and heritage information generated by past oriented scholars (archaeologists, historians etc.) on more future oriented scholars like urban planners.

Why?
Features from the past in present cities have been identified as valuable and as potential assets for future urban development. Transferring knowledge about the history and heritage of the urban landscape is considered to be a challenging matter. With this experiment we aim to develop a methodology on how the knowledge on the past landscapes can be exchanged, thus how the use of historical and heritage features can be optimized.

How?
A design concourse was organised in which half of the architects worked with this digital cultural biography app and the other half used conventional sources. Questionnaires were taken to measure the differences in appreciation, knowledge and use of heritage in the designs. Furthermore an expert jury judged all the designs and selected two winners. (the designs can be found at the tab designs).

Who?
The content of the App is gathered by the Royal Dutch Institute in Rome KNIR www.knir.it together with the Spatial Information Laboratory (SPINlab) VU University Amsterdam (www.spinlab.vu.nl) and Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Roma (SSBAR, http://archeoroma.beniculturali.it/en). The App is developed by the 2CoolMonkeys (www.2coolmonkeys.com) and the SPINlab.

The experiment was sponsored by the Royal Dutch Airlines KLM (www.klm.nl) and il Disegno Testaccio (http://www.ildisegnotestaccio.com/).

Scientific output
The academic framework in which the research takes place is described in the article
De Kleijn, M., N. van Manen, H. Scholten and Jan Kolen (2013): User-Centric SDI Framework Applied to Historical and Heritage European Landscape Research. Under review in International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research
http://ijsdir .jrc.ec.europa.eu/index.php/ijsdir/article/view/341
The development of the App is presented during the 6th International Workshop on Personalized Access to Cultural Heritage. The scientific paper for the proceedings
De Kleijn, M., C. van Aart, N. van Manen, G.-J. Burgers and Henk Scholten (2013): Testaccio, A Digital Cultural Biography App
can be found here:
http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-997/patch2013_paper_11.pdf

Disclaimer
We have done our best to ensure that we are allowed to publish the data presented in our app. Please contact Maurice de Kleijn [email protected] if you notice any irregularities. The app used in the experiment was richer with data than the present app.

Mapping API provided by Esri ArcGIS Runtime SDK for iOS