Cultural Heritage Systems Evaluation and Design: The Virtual Heritage Center of the city of Rome

This paper is concerned with the evaluation and potential of IS for archaeology and cultural tourism. We call the support of cultural heritage communication with ICT “e-heritage systems” (e-HS). Many advanced ICTs are involved in cultural projects. In this paper we shall primarily focus on evaluating the a priori potential of e-HS for fully exploiting the communicative potential of ICT. This paper applies fundamental concepts from interpretive archaeology and Heidegger’ s phenomenological analysis in Being and Time to evaluate an example for an e-HS, i.e. the Virtual Heritage Center of the City of Rome, from a user-oriented perspective.