I-PETER (Interactive Platform to Experience Tours and Education on the Rocks): a virtual system for the understanding and dissemination of mineralogical-petrographic science

Abstract Nowadays mineralogical and petrographic sciences represent important resources for the understanding of natural and cultural heritage. Indeed, the implication in economic and social scenario, from the exploitation of geo-resources to the natural stone application in architecture, involves the whole society. In this context, scientific museums are called to enhance society awareness about the importance of minerals and rocks, while facilitating their understanding. It is well-known that the majority of the population is still left out from the museum fruition, usually because of problems of cultural accessibility. In order to find a solution, the Museum of Mineralogy, Petrography and Volcanology of the University of Catania implemented a new communication system based on the visitor’s personal experience. The idea is to give to all users, regardless of their educational level, the possibility to learn by playing. The collaboration among geologists, conservators and computer scientists led to the implementation of a web application called I-PETER: Interactive Platform to Experience Tours and Education on the Rocks. The application, interacting with a database, offers to the public two different modes of exploring the museum’s collections. The visitor can decide to observe the rocks or minerals from the sample exposed to the internal structure and then explore their external application on monuments, or he/she can choose to make a tour in the interactive map, focusing on a particular monument and from there make the virtual reverse path from the macro to the micro scale. Furthermore, thanks to the effort made to construct the knowledge base at the base of I-PETER web app, a labelled dataset of images of rocks and minerals can be easily released for future petrological investigations based on machine learning. Thanks to this pilot project, the museum’s scientific knowledge can promote cultural tourism by making it more accessible to a wide public, as well as support scientific research on petrography and mineralogy.