Kanaan is a multi-disciplinary project that emerged at the initiative of a team of specialists in cultural heritage. Kanaan aims to valorize Palestinian cultural assets as tourism resources through user-friendly and stakeholder-relevant e-services in order to increase public awareness about Palestinian cultural heritage.
Accordingly, the team working for Kanaan seeks to develop a novel user-friendly and stakeholder-relevant ICT environment that is envisioned as both a distributed repository of intelligent cultural heritage content and an architecture software that enables content interoperability (service-oriented) and content-customized access and presentation (agent-oriented). Services provided via the web to Palestinian cultural destinations will support the cultural tourism experience. One of these services will assume the form of a decision support system, integrating state-of-the-art multi-criteria analysis tools for policymakers.*3
The aim of Kanaan is to contribute to improving the understanding of Palestinian cultural heritage and its identities in order to strengthen cohesion and solidarity and to encourage modern visions and uses of its past. In this direction, new technologies and digital cultural heritage play an innovative role, enabling new and richer interpretations of our common Palestinian culture while contributing to sustainable economic growth.
Nowadays digital models play a key role in the representation of the shape, appearance, and conservation condition of heritage. Geographic information systems (GIS) and 3-D representation have to support linked information through shape-related analysis and must provide the necessary semantic information to facilitate in-depth studies for researchers and users in order to offer new perspectives to researchers and new understandings to citizens, research users, and the cultural and creative industries.
One of the main aims is to create new avenues in the way tangible cultural heritage is studied, visualized, curated, displayed, and monitored, significantly improving our understanding of Palestine’s unique cultural diversity and our capacity to communicate rich narratives about the past.
The main Kanaan steps focus on developing new methods and tools for 3-D modelling and analysis of Palestinian cultural assets starting from state-of-the-art methods and proposing advancements of hardware and software tools, as well as new approaches and methodologies for the access and exploitation of 3-D cultural-heritage data by means of the platform
The challenge placed before Kanaan is to increase the digitization of heritage contents (material and immaterial) not only for documentation, management, and conservation purposes but also in order to expand the access, use, and re-use of cultural heritage by means of digital representations, platforms, devices, social media, and ICT tools. Even more importantly, social entrepreneurship in Palestine is still in its infancy, which increases the challenge that Kanaan faces to expand its impact.
