Cloud Computing and Virtual Heritage: The Social Media-Oriented Paradigm Experienced at Cineca

Cloud computing is today involving software development and usage in a new phase, entailing not only a pervasive relevance as a technology but also a cultural value as the novel paradigm for supporting knowledge construction. Cloud paradigms locate applications on the top of levels usually employed to manage the complexity of modern computer systems, delivering the metaphor of ubiquitous available resources (software as well as data), without having to care about where data are located nor how they will be delivered. The 'as a Service' formula is outlining a new epistemic scenario that addresses not only agile IT needs for dealing with a business which is made more globalised, but also humanities requirements for exploiting data in order to disseminate culture. We refer to this scenario as a social media-oriented Cloud computing, in order to distinguish it from the usual one, i.e IT agility. This paper relates Virtual Heritage Cineca experiences aimed at developing Cloud solutions mixing humanities targets with Cloud technology results. The mixed approach investigated common principles grouping applications at the Cloud high abstraction level to implement a Web-centric one, as a Service meta interface that hybridizes standard Google Earth tools with application server patterns in order to improve the construction of knowledge about cultural data and resources, traditionally delivered on the Web (i.e. Web pages).