Dear Colleagues,

It is evident that cultural heritage represents a worldwide resource of inestimable value for future and present generations, attracting millions of visitors every year to visit historical cities, monuments, museums and exhibitions. Recently, ICT and KET have been experimented with as a way of providing new means of public engagement. They include different forms of valorization and fruition, whether on site during a visit, or online before or after the visit. These applications, ranging from mobile apps, through interactive experiences (VRE and AR) and online post-visit experiences, have aimed to engage visitors with new and interesting activities and to promote an interaction with cultural heritage in a different way to the more traditional museum text label (see Special Issue “The IoT in the Cultural Heritage Sector” of Sustanibility—MDPI).

The increasing development of ICT applications in the framework of cultural heritage also involves the conservation and restoration fields; in particular, IoT technologies allow enlarging the applications beyond valorization and fruition towards new conservation strategies through monitoring, the engagement of visitors, and developing a sense of belonging to monuments, historical buildings, and historic centers. The IoT enables us to gather every type of data—images, videos, and ASCII data—that can be acquired by specific devices/sensors or by visitors’/citizens’ interactions with the heritage on display. Determining how it is possible to manage these data for extracting useful information for heritage conservation is a future challenge. 

This Special Issue offers an opportunity to discuss the ways in which the IoT can impact cultural heritage owing to the interaction of the engineering and physics disciplines with each other, whether for technological applications, or cultural and social aspects. Contributions from any disciplinary domain that focus on the possible applications of the IoT and Industry 4.0 to cultural heritage are welcome, involving institutions, academia and enterprises in a discussion about the state of the art concerning this topic, which requires a joint approach by experts from different sectors.

Dr. Cristiano Riminesi
Guest Editor

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• heritage science
• tangible and intangible heritage
• building and urban rehabilitation
• industrial heritage
• climate change
• biodiversity
• preventive conservation
• wireless sensors
• big data
• machine learning
• virtual reality
• augmented reality
• mixed reality
• extended reality
• sustainability