The project
SMARTOUR — Intelligent Platform for Tourism — is a large industrial-research and experimental-development project funded by MIUR (the Italian Ministry of University and Research) under the PON “Ricerca e Competitività” 2007–2013 programme, Smart Cities and Communities call — Cultural Heritage area (Decreto Direttoriale 391/Ric, 5 July 2012, project code SCN 00166, born from the merger of the SMARTOUR and INTUIT proposals). Project coordinator: Paolo Campegiani (iCampus, lead partner); scientific coordinator: Prof. Andrea Lingua (Politecnico di Torino).
The consortium brings together 9 SMEs, 4 universities (Politecnico di Torino, Perugia, Trento, Sapienza Rome) and 3 CNR institutes (IAC, IASI, IRAT). The project closed with a final conference held on 19 September 2022 at the Aula Magna of DIAG, Sapienza University of Rome.
Goals
SMARTOUR delivers an integrated technology platform that turns visits to Italian art and culture cities into an intelligent, interactive and safe experience, across all phases (before / during / after the visit) and on multiple channels (web, mobile, kiosk, IoT, social).
Three service areas:
- Cultural-heritage fruition — multimedia content, 3D reconstructions, augmented reality, gamification, profile-based personalised tours
- Safety and emergency management — distributed sensors, video analytics, mobility safety, support for Civil Protection / firefighters / law enforcement
- Public-administration support — pervasive monitoring of cultural heritage and territory state, flow analytics, data-driven planning
Field trials ran in Salerno (urban safety), Tuscany — Prato and Pisa (cultural fruition and AR), Pistoia (conservation monitoring) and Piedmont (vehicular mobility and infomobility).
noze’s role
noze took part in the project with Stefano Noferi as software architect from the very first draft (2013/2014), in partnership with 01 Sistemi, contributing to three technologically critical work packages. On each of the related deliverables Stefano Noferi coordinated the activities of the partners involved:
OR 1.3 — Infrastructure analysis and integration requirements
Foundational technology scouting and state-of-the-art analysis on communication infrastructures and available systems, with the goal of defining the integration and interoperability requirements of the SMARTOUR platform. The analysis covered in depth: the API-first approach (REST, gRPC, GraphQL, Apache Thrift, MQTT, message queues, data streams, OGC standards) and its enabling technologies (API management, gateway, governance, AuthN/AuthZ); deployment models (single/two/multi-tier, SOA, microservices, serverless) and delivery models (on-premise, private/public/hybrid cloud); container orchestration and Kubernetes as the de-facto standard; programming languages, IoT and localisation API characteristics, sensor and system infrastructures.
This work laid the technical groundwork for the architectural choices later consolidated in OR 11.3 and 12.2. Results published in deliverable D1.3 — Analysis of communication infrastructures and available systems for the definition of integration and interoperability requirements.
OR 11.3 — Cloud-native platform
Design and rollout of the cloud-computing infrastructure on which all the project’s software deliverables were integrated and tested. After scouting and state-of-the-art analysis, the architectural choice was to commit fully to the cloud-native paradigm, with native Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery, performance monitoring, problem detection, API-first design and microservices architecture.
Open source stack selected and put into production: Kubernetes + Rancher (orchestration and multi-cluster management), GitLab CE (CI/CD and private container registry), Grafana (monitoring), running on hardware provided by 01 Sistemi. On top of the infrastructure: a partner onboarding service, dedicated namespaces and deployments, a ticketing/helpdesk system for integration support, centralised logging and monitoring.
Results published in deliverable D11.3 — Report on Research, selection and prototype implementation of the cloud computing architecture.
OR 12.2 — Web access portals
Set-up of the web portals for platform operators and for the public administrations involved in the field trials, in close collaboration with Gematica (lead of OR 12) and with the OR 11 partners. The choice was to adopt a headless CMS with a component-based architecture, natively integrated with the cloud-native microservices stack, so that authoring/editing/preview could be decoupled from publishing and distribution, and independent interfaces could be generated per channel (responsive web, mobile, social, API, IoT, third-party integrations).
Results published in deliverable D12.2 — Prototype of the web access portals for platform operators and PAs.
Technologies and approach
Throughout the project, priority was given to Open Source and FLOSS technologies, refreshing the traditional cloud-computing concepts with the paradigms that have proven their value in the latest generation of platforms: containerisation, declarative orchestration, GitOps, infrastructure-as-code, observability, independently deployable microservices.